Rockband review

Clare Hopping

We review Rockband for the iPhone, the musical masterpiece that tests your skills across the board

Published on Nov 6, 2009

Rockband is probably the most popular music-based console game ever to grace the screens of wannabe musicians around the world, and now it's been developed for the iPhone.

Granted, you don't get the full instrument-playing experience with Rockband on the iPhone as you do on console, but it does make full use of the 3GS's bright screen, fast processor and accelerometer.

The game is pretty similar to Tap Tap Revenge in some aspects - like on the console version of the game, you have to hit the coloured notes as they hurtle towards you in guitar, bass and drum mode. Vocals mode is a little more tricky, as the notes don't move downwards towards you, but from the right to the left.

We found the best way to work this was to turn the iPhone on its side and play the same way as with guitar, drums or bass. Then you can use two hands rather than one as you are forced to do otherwise.

One rather irritating issue we found is that if you've built up your Overdrive bar by correctly hitting the glowing notes, you'll have to take your eye off the game while you shake the iPhone to activate Overdrive mode to build up those all important points.

There's no real way to rectify this except to wait for a pause in the song (or a point where your instrument doesn't have a part).

We tested the game on easy, medium and hard levels, and found that the skill needed increases dramatically between medium and hard, with an increased tempo and combination of buttons to press at the same time.

Although our iPhone had little difficulty zipping through the game, we did encounter some issues when playing a couple of songs - the music would continue, but scroll bar and notes paused to make us lose out on vital points.

The variety of songs isn't as in depth as on the console version, with only 20 songs to choose from at the start.

However, there is a Music Store where you can buy more tunes. At the time of writing, you could buy seven more bundles of two songs each, costing 59p. This will of course bulk up the file size of the game by around 15MB apiece, but is worth a go if you find yourself at the end of the game, achieving 100 percent on the hard levels.

Graphics aren't the most stunning we've seen, but this isn't a bad thing - you don't want your eye to de drawn away from the scrolling when you're in the middle of the game to watch yourself in cartoon form rocking in the background.

Multiplayer mode is an option here, so you can create a band with your friends using Bluetooth as you would in your living room.

Rockband is pretty expensive at £5.99, but it's definitely worth a punt if you're thinking of buying a music game that will keep you entertained right from the beginning. Just be wary that you may suffer from thumb cramp after a while of rocking out.