The relative cost of videogames should never be carte blanche to put out any old rubbish. After all, the last time we checked our Friends List it wasn’t packed from top to bottom with happy dinosaurs chasing Doritos vans – although one person was prodding away at My Horse And Me 2, perhaps the most grammatically incorrect game of all time. Our point is: a budget price point and the ability to use peripherals you found round the back of a skip cannot justify tossing sod all thought into it. The fact that this comes from a company that can seriously claim to have invented instrument-based rhythm-action makes it all the more depressing. You see, Rock Revolution doesn’t just feel dated, rather from some kind of alternate universe in which Guitar Hero hasn’t yet been invented and it’s still 2005. The only upside is Simon can’t sing Sk8er Boi as James Hetfield because there’s no microphone. Actually, give us a minute to think about that…

The fact is there’s almost nothing to recommend this pile of derivative stool water for, so we see little reason not to plough straight into exactly why that is. Take that, flowery metaphors! First off, developer Zoë Mode has chosen to include a little nod to previous Bemani titles, which is all well and good, were it not positioned within the most important feature in any rhythm-action title: its note stream. Like GuitarFreaks titles of old, which were brilliant arcade fun until something better came along, notes run vertically from top to bottom. This is quite simply a terrible decision, and one not muddied by issues of personal taste.

It is demonstrable that notes spend far less time on screen than in either of Rock Revolution’s rivals, and, what’s more, they appear just out of your line of sight, without fail. The angled fret bar that evolved from Amplitude and Frequency’s esoteric rollercoaster allows players infinitely more preparation time and has one further knock-on effect, too: put simply, note positioning seems to have been dumbed down to accommodate the smaller slice of time that players are afforded, hence completing a bizarre vicious circle in which Zoë Mode has made the core design of its game worse in order to make the nuts and bolts of its action less enjoyable. That’s how it seems, at least.

Only a shade less importantly comes the track list. Not only is it under half the size of Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour, but also none of the tracks are performed by their original artists. It’s like the last four years in music-based gaming never happened. What’s more, each song’s title appears without the name of the band behind it, like the developer’s not actually told anyone that their songs have been covered. We’re sure that hasn’t happened, but it struck us as amusing nonetheless.

It’s really quite difficult to express exactly how much of a retrograde step returning to cover artists is when you’ve sampled the real thing. Quite aside from the smattering of murdered vocal tracks – System of a Down’s Chop Suey, for example – you’re robbed of the opportunity to plaster over such incompetence with your own horrible voice. There really isn’t any excuse for making the proverbial pub live music night out of a rhythm-action game – it just heightens the feeling that this was rushed out to meet a perceived demand that’s already over-saturated.

… continued