Just as there are Beatles people and there are Rolling Stones people, there are Rock Band people and Guitar Hero people. You can like both, but you have to choose a favorite. I can certainly say upfront that I'm a Rock Band person, and thankfully for all of us, the Beatles certainly seemed to agree with my preferences.
Harmonix won the Fab Four over with their superior reverence for the music their games pay homage to. ""The Beatles Rock Band"" cements Harmonix as the finest music game developers in the world—sorry Neversoft, but not all of us think having Kurt Cobain sing ""You Give Love a Bad Name"" in ""Guitar Hero 5"" shows respect for the artist's spirit.
Truthfully, the actual game design of ""The Beatles Rock Band"" has more in common with ""Guitar Hero 2"" than the latest iteration of Rock Band—rather than a collection of open venues to choose from, booting up the story mode of ""BRB"" starts you at the Cavern Club, the venue where the Beatles were first discovered. You must beat each song in that set list to proceed to ""The Ed Sullivan Show,"" and so on through the Beatlemania years and eventually Abbey Road Studios, with fantastic animated transitions between each change in time period.
This makes for a much more rigid experience—you don't have a lot of choices right away—but realistically, the odds of players wanting to skip any songs is pretty slim. These are all Beatles tracks after all, no ""inspired by the group"" junk like we saw in ""Guitar Hero: Aerosmith."" Behind the scenes and other bonus documentary footage boost the authenticity of the game as a documentation of the Beatles' career.
Naturally, the game sounds amazing—every song employs those lovely 2009 masters. Turn it up and enjoy each chord of ""While My Guitar Gently Weeps"" and the twangs of ""I Saw Her Standing There."" They made great use of takes and sound bites as well—Ed Sullivan introduces the band for their famous TV appearance, you can hear the four talking about a second take of ""Get Back"" and, of course, Ringo screams ""I've got blisters on me fingers!"" when you beat ""Helter Skelter.""
Visually, the game is still pretty similar to ""Rock Band"" with a 1960s palette swap. Deploying ""Beatlemania,"" the game's version of overdrive (or Star Power for you GH fans), throws flowers and streamers all over the fret board and kicks the crowds of teenage girls in the background into a deafening frenzy.
John, Paul, George and Ringo are rendered in a cartoonish style to match the period in which they're playing—from the mop tops to the crazy, furry suits from the video for ""I Am the Walrus."" The sets are accurate early in the game, before moving into fantastical drug trips from the Abbey Road studio that take us through skies with diamonds and octopus's gardens. You'll attract onlookers just trying to figure out what's happening in the background.
No revolutions on the technical front, but who said we wanted one? Same great guitar game, this time with more complex bass and singing parts due to the increase in harmonizing on Beatles tracks—though you Metallica fans will likely find little challenge here apart from maybe ""Helter Skelter"" or ""Revolution.""
You can sing with up to three vocalists now, but the word detection is still forgiving enough that singing is still hardly skill-based—mumbling the words in tune will get you through most songs, which will only bug people who can actually sing.
You get 45 Beatles songs on the disc, ranging from ""Twist and Shout"" to ""I Me Mine."" It might sound like a lot, but dedicated players will probably blast through the game in one marathon play session of three to four hours. But you will want to play and replay and replay these songs, and with the party potential of the Beatles library, in addition to the promise that every Beatles album will eventually be available as downloadable content, there's still a lot of value to the game.
It's a short yet sweet experience, but Beatles fans won't be disappointed. Now we just need Harmonix to get going on the ""Rolling Stones Rock Band.""
Grade: AB
