A Tough Act To Follow – Green Day: Rock Band Review

Imagine this – It’s your birthday.  You do all the standard birthday things like cake and presents, but then your friends tell you that they have a surprise for you.  They blindfold you and throw you in the car.  When you finally reach your destination, they take off the blindfold and you realize that you’re at an arena.  There’s a lot of people around, but you’re too disoriented to figure out exactly what’s going on.  You enter the arena, and you and your friends take your place amongst the crowd; you’re just one of thousands now.

Eventually, the lights dim and the crowd starts buzzing.  You look up at the stage, and out walk The Beatles.  The friggin’ Beatles! They play for a long time while the entire crowd sings along to every song.  Everyone loves the Liverpool lads, and it seems to unite the entire audience.  After they’re done, they walk off stage, but it turns out that they were only the opener.  Wow!  How could this get any better?  Who could the next band be, that The Beatles were opening for them?

Approximately a half-hour later, the arena lights dim again.  It’s time for the next band, and oh boy, they are going to have to put on one hell of a show to top The Fab Four.  When the curtain raises, there stands…Green Day?! Sure, you know some of their songs, and you even really like a few of them, but they’re following the most popular band of all time?  You are decidedly underwhelmed.

Unfortunately, this is exactly how Green Day: Rock Band felt.

While it seems really unfair to say that a game is undeserving simply because of the time that it came out, Green Day: Rock Band honestly suffers from it.  Anyone that comes after  The Beatles is going to be hard pressed to impress.  Fortunately, there are some other nuances of the game that are worth mentioning.

To Harmonix’s credit, the entire game feels wonderful while playing.  The guitar and bass charts have a timing window that feels very natural.  The only problem I had is that a lot of the tracks were simply too easy.  There wasn’t a lot of variation in the flow, or fret-burning solos.  It’s a lot of power chords and strumming of eighth notes.  The drums are incredibly fun, especially if you like the pop punk-rock genre.  A lot of the tracks are a bit tough on the higher difficulties, mostly because some of them get pretty fast (but hey, that’s what practicing is for, right?)

The final instrument, the vocals, are the instrument that always ties together the entire Rock Band experience for me.  So, it’s important to note that the vocals are fully functional, and if you’re off key, it’s easy to correct it (unlike that other music game on the market).  Back from The Beatles edition is the option to sing in harmonies, but Green Day: Rock Band doesn’t over-do it.  Most songs don’t have a ton of phrases with more than one vocal line.  Overall, it’s a fun addition that gets more people involved in the action.

One of the most disappointing features of the game was the lack of diversity in venues.  The Rock Band franchise has always had lot’s of unique places to play, with The Beatles: Rock Band being by far the coolest with the stadiums and dreamscapes.  Green Day: Rock Band offers three different venues.  The Warehouse is where you’ll play their earlier material, a grimy rundown establishment with an intimately frantic crowd.  The other two venues are The National Bowl in Milton Keynes and the Fox Theater in Oakland.  Because of the large-scale production and giant audience, these two arenas feel a lot the same except for Green Day’s wardrobe.  Since this is something that Harmonix has done so well in the past, it felt a bit lackluster that they didn’t make a better effort, here.

The song selection wisely includes pretty much every semi-popular song that any casual fan would want included.  There are a lot of tracks that most people won’t recognize, but that’s because the developers wanted to put an emphasis on getting “American Idiot” and “21st Century Breakdown” (with the DLC) in the game in their entirety because they’re concept albums.  Most of the rest of the tracks are off of “Dookie”, while “Nimrod” and “Warning” are left curiously under-represented.  However, one of the game’s biggest positives is that you can export the entire soundtrack into the Rock Band 2 and 3 libraries.  This way, you can play a couple of Green Day songs, and then switch to another artist.

Green Day: Rock Band is a title that will be sure to vigorously embrace some, but ultimately, will probably be forgotten before too long.  While it has it’s moments where it rocks hard, the entire game is sure to feel too repetitive to a good chunk of players.  Last September, The Beatles: Rock Band took a giant step forward to evolving the Rock Band franchise; Green Day: Rock Band merely feels like a step to the side, at best.