Rock Band FINALLY gets to Wii and is now stripped down and pathetic.
The Bad: Awful graphics; guitars are annoying, oddly enough; no connectivity to Guitar Hero controllers; no downloadable content; Band Tour and everything involving characters is gone; single player and multiplayer are separate for no apparent reason.
Wii has been completely and utterly screwed multiple times despite being the bestselling system this generation, by a mile. It's unbelievable that the Wii is getting graphics that are weaker than what the Gamecube can do, and the Wii can do twice what it can. Some companies put in the effort and you can see the very impressive results, naturally including Nintendo.
But EA Games has completely ignored the Wii. It took half a year for a halfhearted effort of Rock Band to come to Wii, and while the gameplay is naturally impressive (generally), it's not half of what it is on the other systems.
You'll first notice that the single player career and multiplayer career have to be separate, meaning if you want to play with friends, you have to have a different "band" than you do playing solo. This makes no real sense, and is the first nuisance the game brings onto the table.
Moving along, we get to the tracklist. This, on the other hand, is pretty good stuff. There are 60 songs or so, a few less than Guitar Hero III, but plenty nevertheless, especially with four different instruments, not just two. Some great classics are in there that parents will enjoy, some songs you've probably heard on the radio, and a couple that are a tad obscure, but still fun once you learn what they are. There really aren't any truly bad songs, even if some are weaker. The combo of Guitar Hero, drums, and karaoke (although it tells you how badly you're doing)is a pretty damn good idea, and a sensible one.
You'll also notice, however, that you can't pick a character, let alone create one as could be done on 360 and PS3. This makes it pretty much impossible to connect to your character. In Guitar Hero, you can at least enjoy that you hand selected your character. Here, it plays with random characters already set for each song. It weakens the feeling of being "in a band" which the game is presumably supposed to make.
Now the graphics come up. They're blurry and just as pathetic as Guitar Hero's, if different. I too am sick of this. I'll keep docking points, as will everyone else, until it's fixed. Sadly though, the games will sell anyway, so I don't know what can be done to help the matter. Maybe The Conduit will help out...
The sound, fortunately, is good. If not for that... Well, seeing as it's a music game, it'd be basically an epic failure.
Now for gameplay, the last part of this game. There's no Band Tour, an RPG like, extremely impressive set-up in the other versions of the game, also taking away from the band feeling. It's not that Harmonix suddenly sucks, since they did the fantastic first two Guitar Heroes and the far superior versions of Rock Band; it's just that this port is pretty weak.
The mic works fine. You hit it to the beat, and it picks it up just fine. You sing into it, it'll tell the pitch just fine. You can belt it to the songs you like all you want. It is annoying when you're bringing your voice lower and it doesn't pick it up, since it generally wants you to be singing in a different way, but the game helps you out with a background singer.
The drums are pretty freaking cool. The four pads and pedal work the way they should, you won't break anything (one good thing about this version) and you will find it to be just as challenging to improve upon as guitar.
But guitar and bass... Somehow, the company that thought of Guitar Hero managed to make a pretty poor guitar. It's cool that there are two sets of the buttons, one for solos so you don't have to strum, and that you can make your guitar echo and such, but the thing they missed is that the strum bar is just plain annoying. It's hard to make it work, let alone keep a beat, and it just hurts your hand. Also, Guitar Hero guitars don't work with Rock Band, which would alleviate the problem, since the Guitar Hero III guitar set-up on Wii was intuitive and fantastic. It makes no sense that when I play at a party, nobody wants to play guitar.
Plus, when you're singing, you're going to want to sing a song you know. The other option is to play one of the other instruments and listen to the lyrics a lot until you know it. That's all well and good, except that that basically means you'll be trying to make the guitar work or playing drums a lot, more than likely in single player. This is where downloadable content would help out. But it's nowhere to be found in this version. True, the Wii has a strange storage system, but Guitar Hero is getting around it at this very moment, and without too much trouble, even while staying permanently online, 360/PS3 style.
The game is still fun, don't get me wrong. Drums are fun to learn, singing is naturally like karaoke (except better), and you can at least pass guitar songs. Solos are well handled, as is overdrive, aka star power, as you can get more of it while you're already using it, unlike in Guitar Hero. Plus, you can "save" other band members with it, although that system doesn't work that well unless you have a guitarist or bassist, the only band members who can use overdrive whenever they want.
The only addition to this version is five more songs, which isn't much of an addition in the first place. But that includes Ramones and All-American Rejects, so I'm not exactly complaining, but it doesn't make up for how much the game's been cut up.
Should you get it? Well, no. If you do, it's not like you'll hate it; you'll have fun. But with World Tour basically doing better on Wii than on any other system, with less sound problems, an extra mode, and DLC, plus the guitars being better and the history of Guitar Hero III and the pretty good Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, it's a much better choice to go with Guitar Hero on this one. It's a different story on 360 and PS3, where it's a closer competition. Rock Band might even be superior on those, but on Wii, don't look here for the best music game experience.