Odds are, you already know the general concept of Rock Band. If you've played Guitar Hero, or at least seen it in action, then you already have a sense of what 75% or so of the gameplay is like. You pick a vintage rock track to play and you use one of the game's faux musical instruments—this time it's not just the guitar but also the drums and a microphone for vocals—to play it on stage in front of hundreds or even tens of thousands of adoring virtual fans.
For the guitars (lead and bass) and drums you'll each see a series of vertical columns, each with its own set of colored notes (green, red, yellow, blue and orange) that flow down in pattern with the music. These notes correspond to fret buttons on the guitar or the pads on the drums. (Orange, for the drum, represents the bass drum kick pedal.) The drums use actual drumsticks in a fairly authentic recreation of the actual drum playing experience. The guitar play requires a bit more suspension of disbelief, but using the five fret buttons in concert with a strummer, located where a real guitar's strings would be is, as Guitar Hero proved, still a fairly convincing simulation.
The vocals are an entirely different beast. For those you'll see a vocal track horizontally across the screen that shows you both the words for each track and a line that moves up and down the track to indicate the pitch at which you should be singing. It may seem simplistic, but it gets the job done.
At its core, that's basically it for gameplay. But the actual experience goes so much further.
When it's working at its very best, Rock Band completely overshadows the Guitar Hero experience because it's a game in which you truly feel like you've become part of a band, playing some of the best music the world of rock and roll has to offer, from Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones to When You Were Young by The Killers and a whole lot of stuff in between. It's a game in which you and three of your best buddies can group up, one playing lead guitar, one on bass, one on the drums and one, hopefully with some degree of modest talent, taking on vocals, and truly have an unparalleled shared gaming experience. For those who like the basic gameplay this genre has to offer it's a far better multiplayer experience than you'll find going online in Call of Duty 4 or World of Warcraft. This game is about playing music, or at least pretending to, and the feeling it's capable of bestowing on you is, at times, transcendent. And it's not just the inclusion of drums and vocals that make it a better game than Guitar Hero 3. It's the presentation, the way everything form the interface, to the clubs and stadiums in which you play, not to mention the vastly superior note charts, they all contribute much more significantly to the whole.
The local multiplayer experience is made even better through the implementation of the game's World Tour mode, in which you create your band's virtual rockers, come up with a band name (even designing a logo, if you so choose), choose a hometown, and then take your band on tour. At first you'll only be able to play small local establishments. Do well, though, and you'll get consistently improving modes of transportation, ranging from a beaten down old van, to a tour bus, to your own airplane. As you unlock these modes of transportation, you'll be able to play further and further out from your hometown, even going international. But that's just the start.
As your band successfully plays sets at various locations you'll gain fans. (Conversely, if you fail a song, you'll lose fans.) The more you play, and the better you play, the more fans you'll get. This opens up new and larger venues within each locality. It also garners your band more attention, earning perks like a manager that can guide you towards which gigs you should play, roadies to help you haul your equipment across the world, even the hiring of a PR firm. The only drawback is that the number of fans you earn is limited by the difficulty level at which your weakest band member plays. And if you've got someone only comfortable playing on Easy, which isn't a stretch for a game that's only beginning to reach a mass audience, you are extremely limited in how far you can take your band.
In addition to all this, there's fantastic variety in the types of gigs you can play. You can just pick a single song. You can choose a custom set. You can choose a random set. And there are a ton of unique gigs in which you'll find yourself competing for a new van, roadies, etc. There's even an uber gig that eventually comes available that consists of playing every song in the game back-to-back.
