Review: The Beatles: Rock Band (PS3)

By Stephen Munn | November 9, 2009

The Long and Winding Road

If you’re not familiar with Harmonix’s work on the Guitar Hero franchise and its various branchings, here’s a quick primer. Harmonix had a runaway hit with their Guitar Hero rhythm game which featured a special guitar controller, and it made Activision a great deal of money. The software was made by the rhythm game masters at Harmonix, the guitar was made by peripheral masters RedOctane, and the Guitar Hero brand was owned by publishing master Activision. MTV decided to get in on the action, so they bought Harmonix. In what looked at the time like a panic, Activision bought RedOctane. Most of us wondered what would happen next, now that RedOctane, Harmonix, and Guitar Hero could no longer work together. What happened was Rock Band.

I Should Have Known Better

When Neversoft took over developing the Guitar Hero games for Activision, there were some ups and downs. Harmonix never made a Guitar Hero game (or anything else) on a Nintendo platform, so those of us squarely in the Nintendo camp had no great love for that developer. With Activision’s backing, the skilled programmers at Neversoft made Guitar Hero III for every console, and I was there on day one. Most people will agree that Guitar Hero III was OK, but its surprising difficulty made the game more frustrating for me than fun, even on medium difficulty. I eventually ended up unloading the game, and decided I was done with such games.

There’s a reason I’m providing all this background, and it’s because this conflict, this great musical struggle between publishing titans Activision and EA, has really driven the genre in some fascinating directions. Neversoft eventually got a solid grip on Guitar Hero with Guitar Hero 5, which is, reportedly, very good. Harmonix refined their already impressive skill set with Rock Band 2. Capitalism is like that, but if we take a step back and have a look at what this has done for the consumer, we may not be pleased with what we find.

Don’t Let Me Down

A good portion of this wrestling match has been over licensing of music. Now that it’s a standard for all the music in these games to be played by the original artists, exclusives with the more desirable names could theoretically mean big sales. When it was announced that the Rock Band name would connect to The Beatles name, everyone was excited. Tired of not being good at playing toy guitars that only hurt my hands, I had moved on to singing along with music videos in Sony’s SingStar games. Beatles: Rock Band still caught my eye, but my real excitement was when I heard mention of SingStar The Beatles, a game that never existed and likely never will. I responded with anger over this licensing exclusivity, because I wanted to play SingStar The Beatles. I softened up a bit when it became clear that I could get the game and play it with my SingStar microphones. So I asked the people behind the game for a copy.

The Beatles: Rock Band is a stunning, stirring, and at times beautiful yet shallow guided tour through The Beatles’ career. SingStar: The Beatles this is not. In fact, there are a lot of things that The Beatles: Rock Band isn’t.

And Your Bird Can Sing

When I received my review copy of Beatles Rock Band, all they sent me was the standalone disc, which was fine. I had planned to review the game as a SingStar title, since there have been bundles shown of the game with the SingStar microphones for PS3. When I started the game up, it was ready to go as just a singing game, but I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that the game doesn’t stand up as a direct competitor to SingStar. The singing experience is much more refined, and above all much, much more challenging in SingStar. On medium difficulty, you can miss notes while singing and still score 100% in BRB. If I could do that in SingStar, I’d have a SingStar (90%+) rating on every song by now. I don’t.

Beyond the challenge, there are a number of features BRB doesn’t have that we enjoy in SingStar. This includes the original music videos, as all the performances in BRB are constructed using surprisingly distinctive, but somewhat stylized 3D Beatle character models in rendered environments. An option to watch videos of the real people would have been pretty great, and I think I would have seriously preferred it to what’s here now, even if the picture quality had been poor. There’s also no ability to record and share audio and video in the game, which is something I’ve become very used to in SingStar.

Perhaps it’s more fair, though, to compare this game to Rock Band 2. There are roughly half as many songs in it, there’s no character creation or tour mode, and absolutely nothing in the game can be personalized. In SingStar, as in Rock Band 2, each player has a name and avatar and all their records are kept by the game. In BRB, everyone on your system has the same name, and it’s the name of your system profile. You can still play it online, and leaderboards will show you how your score on a song compares to that of your friends, which is nice.

Getting Better

There are things here I wish SingStar would adopt, too, like a pitch meter and the scrolling lyrics option. In SingStar, you are given very little indication of where your voice is relative to where it’s supposed to be in many cases, and the lyrics of a song are invisible until it’s time to sing them, so it’s easy to screw up if you’re not ready for what’s coming. Get right on that, Sony.

Harmony is handled differently in BRB than it is in SingStar. When more than one person is singing, if you choose to do harmony, BRB doesn’t distinguish the voices by player. What that means is, one of you can sing the low harmony while the other sings the melody or high harmony, and then you can switch within the same song. The game doesn’t seem to care whether you’re singing the right Beatle’s part throughout the song, and it really kind of feels more lazy than forgiving. I’ve read that the original Rock Band had much less forgiving vocals even than Rock Band 2, so this may instead be a concession to the audience.

Come Together

While I intended to approach the game from the perspective of a hard core SingStar fan, I was given more opportunities when just days after BRB arrived, I received a set of Rock Band 2 instruments to play with the game. I got to work assembling everything and was pleasantly surprised at their construction, as I had heard such bad things about the Rock Band 1 instruments that I expected the worst. Armed with a set of instruments, I set about discovering that BRB is not about the singing at all, but rather about the whole band experience. For me, in fact, it seems to be all about the guitar, because it turns out I can’t drum my way out of a wet paper bag.

I tried some online Quick Play and found the experience to be reasonably tight. There’s no online play in SingStar, but BRB lets you link up with other players and play through the songs on the disc however you like. An online community to share and rate audio and video, as in SingStar, would be nice for BRB.

Yer Blues

Both games have downloadable content, but Beatles Rock Band only works with Beatles DLC, and vice versa. So you can’t play any of your existing Rock Band DLC in Beatles Rock Band and you can’t play any of your Beatles Rock Band DLC in Rock Band or Rock Band 2. This stands in stark contrast to SingStar, because even while playing SingStar Queen, you can play any of your DLC, and you can swap to your SingStar Queen disc from any other SingStar PS3 game and play those songs in that environment without issue. Even Rock Band players got to bring their Rock Band songs into Rock Band 2 if they had a code and five dollars. Beatles buyers don’t.

Further, you can’t mix and match your Beatles or their venues. While progressing through the Story mode in the game, you play sets of Beatles songs in controlled venues. The Beatles change over time through their career. John grows long hair, Paul grows a beard, they change costumes, things like that. There is no way in the game to take the suited, bowl cut Beatles and have them sing Yellow Submarine on a rooftop. Every time you sing a particular song, it will be the same set of four Beatles, and they’ll be in the same venue.

Naturally, it’s not exactly the same thing. Every time you sing one of the songs off SingStar Queen, you’re going to have exactly the same experience. It’s the same song, with the same video. The difference here is that this is a standard for SingStar, but it’s not for Rock Band. It’s clear that such restrictions must be a concession to Apple Corp, the publisher behind The Beatles’ music. I expect that concession to such demands is why we’re seeing Beatles: Rock Band rather than Guitar Hero: The Beatles. One has only to look at the legal struggles between Kurt Cobain’s estate, No Doubt, and Activision to understand what happens when such agreements are not tied up with very solid legal language.

Tell Me Why

That’s what it all comes down to, though. Beatles: Rock Band gives us the general Rock Band mechanic with Beatles music, which is great. I don’t expect people will say the game should never have been made, and honestly whenever you bring out something as influential as The Beatles, not everyone is going to be happy with the result. The key problems with the game are the limitations on what you can do with the music, characters and venues, as well as a short song list (just 44 tracks) out of the box. All these issues would have been much more acceptable at a lower price point, than the $60 we’re looking at right now.

Would we have preferred a song list twice this length, with all the existing limitations, at an $80 price point, or even $100? It’s hard to say. Is it reasonable for us to let EA, MTV, Harmonix, and Apple Corps off the hook on this one? As consumers, we see $60 as a maximum this generation. Rock Band 2 came out with 80+ songs from a multitude of artists and publishers at $60 and everyone got paid enough. How is it that a short compilation of one artist’s music, when tied to their likenesses and carefully assembled venues, warrants the same price point?

Think For Yourself

It’s indisputable that there is nothing in musical history quite like The Beatles. It is my opinion that even with the limitations imposed by Apple Corps, the game still provides plenty of enjoyment for those who love this music, and my wife and I are crazy about the music. I can’t stop playing “Here Comes the Sun,” even though the guitar work kicks my ass. What’s here looks and sounds great. It’s fun playing through Story mode and watching the Beatles evolve over time. It’s exciting to think that, eventually, we might be able to play any Beatles song we want, Rock Band style, even if we have little control over the circumstances.

Your enjoyment of Beatles: Rock Band will come down to just a handful of things. How troubling are the limitations to you? How much money is the software worth? If you accept the limitations and feel that the music is worth it anyway, go for it. It seems to me that those who have the most trouble with this game are those who expected more out of it due to having played Rock Band and Rock Band 2. The best thing to do is learn as much you can about what the game is, and what it isn’t, and make a decision from there.

The End

If you’re looking for SingStar The Beatles, you haven’t found it. If you’re looking for a The Beatles track pack for Rock Band, you haven’t found that either. Still, it’s Rock Band, so the mechanics are solid. The songs are great, they’re fun to play, and a lot of care has gone into what little is in the design. I find the game very enjoyable, and I think most Beatles fans will, even if they might prefer the price come down a little before they take the plunge. I give the game 3.5 out of 5.

Tell Me What You See

Since so many of us on Aeropause have been playing The Beatles: Rock Band, we decided to collaborate on this review. This is especially important because I have next to no background with Rock Band before this. To that end, here are the opinions of some of the other writers on the site.

Joe Fourhman says:

The game over-promised and under-delivered. When Harmonix first announced a Beatles game, they were deliberately cagey about what the game would be. I seem to recall them promising something totally different from Rock Band, which, in the end, seems to have been a red herring designed to make us not expect interoperability across all Rock Band versions. And then the game just ends up as the absolute nicest version of Guitar Hero Aerosmith that you could imagine!

I know there’s a lot of defense talk that says the game is best-loved and perhaps even intended for NEW gamers, not established Rock Band fans. I say nuts to that. Even if you just walk in having never played one of these before, when you compare the features of Rock Band 2 for $60 to the features of Beatles: Rock Band for $60, BRB comes up short. Way short. You’d have to be a Beatles superfan to not see the disparity. At the least, Beatles should have arrived at $50. Unless the Beatles is your most favorite group ever, you’re not getting as much for your $60 as with RB2, and the hooks plainly aren’t there to keep the game viable in the long term. Sure, tons of people love the Beatles, but will they love the career-spanning setlist that includes some truly left-of-center song choices? There are so many well-loved tracks that could have been included to get that list up to a number more in line with other games, and instead Harmonix chose to gimp the list and ding us for DLC (which is arriving at a glacial pace.)

Which brings up another point: whose fault is it? All fingers point to Apple Corps. Not being able to change venues, not being able to use the whammy, not being able to trade songs and DLC back and forth. BRB suffers from upper-level management syndrome, and Harmonix had to bow because, well, it’s the Beatles. I’d let them off the hook for the whammy bar and a few other misses, but taken in total, the game has far too many petty restrictions on it.

One of the world’s greatest bands should have received one of the world’s greatest games. I’m glad that the bonus photographs/movies, character animations and cutscenes are so well done, because if those had sucked, you’d be looking at one giant Beatles cash-in turd.

I asked what the game needed to improve things, and he added:

Swappable DLC is a given. The Beatles songs should have been exportable to RB2, even for another $10 fee. Future Beatles DLC should have been compatible with all Rock Band releases. Should have had at least 60 songs (RB2 had like 80).

The lack of whammy and drum fills is minor, but seems like a petty concession to Apple Corps. Really, the Beatles are the one band in the world that we dare not improvise over?

DLC songs do not appear in the career mode. So all those Trophies that are based on career mode can only ever be accomplished by playing the same 40 songs over and over again, no matter how many new songs you buy.

I would have liked the ability to mix and match the Beatles avatars and venues. I think the bizarre psychadelic stew of Young Paul and Guru George and TV Ringo and Hairy John would have fit right in with the dreamscape angle. Why on earth am I forbidden to play Sgt Pepper on the Ed Sullivan stage? Again, the slavish adherence to the actual Beatles career just ends up dropping features that we take for granted in other games. George and Ringo at least were big Monty Python fans… and prankster absurdity was a big part of the Beatles vibe. So why does this game play it so safe?

Speaking of the vaunted dreamscapes, most of them are just cheesy video effects. Not enough are full blown videos. The dreamscapes were pitched as something that would help justify the game’s loss of standard Rock Band features… and only a handful are truly cool and well-thought-out productions. Same deal with the supposedly “never before heard” audio snippets that play between tracks during the Abbey Road sections. Boy, what a joy to hear a reel rewinding and John mumbling something.

Although the animated open and close is just unbelievably beautiful. Even the animation industry veterans over at CartoonBrew.com were drooling over it. And I do like the photo galleries and unlockable rare videos. So those bits held up their end of the bargain.

Joe Haygood says:

After  I played through The Beatles: Rock Band, I was in conflict.  On the one hand, we had a game that featured some of the best tracks from one of the greatest bands ever, all in one place.  But with all of that, I felt a bit hollow inside.  The Beatles: Rock Band is a solid game, but it was, in my opinion, marketed to the wrong audience.  This is a title that ends up being a great starting point for anyone that has not been involved in the Rock Band series of games.  But if you are like myself, that has amassed a couple hundred DLC titles over time, you will feel that the game ends a bit too quickly, and gives you an “okay, now what” feel.

Good Points:

I did appreciate the look of the game.  Gone are the stylized cartoony figures that were there in the two Rock Band titles.  Instead we get rather good models of the Fab Four.  Throughout the game, all four Beatles fit their historical time period, either with or without beards, moustaches and mop tops.  There is some posturing from the characters that sticks with out as well.  I missed it on the first playthrough, but now I see the little mannerisms that add so much to the personality of the on-screen avatars.  Very good character sequences.

Most of the song selection is top notch.  Normally, a Rock Band or Guitar Hero title will have a huge list of songs, but you only want to actually play about a dozen of those songs.  There are 45 tracks available here, and most are really good, and solid hits in their own right.  Sure there are a few duds, but the hits outweigh the B-sides here.

Harmonies are pretty fun to play, if you get a group that is willing to harmonize.  We had a game night, and it was a ton of fun when we harmonized properly, and it helped our score.  It is the first game to really try to pull this off, and it works fairly well.  For that matter, all of the instruments play well, and the game does get rather challenging on some of the harder difficulties.  I for one thought this would be a cakewalk on Expert, but it was actually very challenging.

Bad Points:

The game is woefully short.  While there are 45 songs, this is the era of musical rhythm games one upping themselves on number of tracks.  It also does not help that a lot of the early songs are short in length, and repetitive.  This is not a fault of the game necessarily, but just that songs in the early 60’s were not usually long in length.

Some of the hyped special features were really let downs in the long run.  Remember all of those great “inside the studio recordings” we were going to get access to in The Beatles: Rock Band.  Well they ended up being very small segments in the beginning of a set list, while the list was loading.  Not exactly what it was made out to be.  There is probably ten to twelve seconds of audio before we are prompted to play.  Also, while there were some great pictures of the band, it was nothing to write home about at times.
In comparison to Rock Band it just ends up falling short.  At my house, we played it for a game night after I bought it in a store, but people never asked to play it at the next two game nights.  When I asked about it, I was told that Rock Band was more entertaining.

DLC links into game rather haphazardly.  I can only attest to this via the one DLC song that was available while I was playing the game.  DLC does not link into the campaign, which means these tracks can only be played in quickplay mode.  It would have been nice to see work done to implement them into the main storyline somehow.

The Beatles Rock Band is a good game.  It can be a fun game for the right audience, but in no way, shape or form, is it a great title.  That still sticks with Rock Band 2.  Casual players that have never got into Rock Band will love this game, as will hardcore beatles fans.  Others might want to look the other way.

If I was scoring it – 3 out of 5.

Vikki says:

I should start out by admitting that I am a Beatles fan. Big time. I grew up with Beatles music, was completely immersed in it, and when I found out about this title I just about lost bladder control with my excitement. As much as my tastes have changed as I’ve grown and as much as I enjoy the eclecticism of the GH and RB franchises, I’ve always been frustrated by setlists that, whilst expansive, had me playing the same dozen songs over and over again. And whilst we’ve been treated to act-specific titles before – Van Halen, Aerosmith etc. – well, those titles could hardly be called ‘treats’ for me. Personally speaking, I’d rather be skinning my ass with a cheese grater than playing nothing but Aerosmith songs. Harsh but very true, unfortunately.

But then the B:RB was announced and I was suddenly a happy girl. Trailers and sneak-peek setlists hit the web and I once again lost control of my bladder. The game looked slick and sexy and whilst I didn’t like all that I was hearing, I was prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, we’re talking about the Beatles, dude.

On the OhNineOhNineOhNine the game hit my doormat and I took the morning off work to put it through its paces. I needn’t have bothered. A few hours would’ve sufficed.

It is unequivocally and undeniably short. It is TOO short. And with a back catalogue as glorious as that of the Fab Four, there is absolutely no excuse for the game to be touting such a short play-through time. It’s frustrating – and painfully obvious – that the Higher-Ups held back a load of additional tracks to generate more cash by way of DLC, but even taking that into account, it still doesn’t excuse such a short set. We could’ve been treated to double the number of tracks and there still would’ve been a healthy choice of DLC to play with. Not cool, Harmonix/Apple Corps – not cool at all.

Shortness aside, what is offered up to play is spectacular. Along with the obvious choices – A Hard Day’s Night, Can’t Buy Me Love, Ticket to Ride, I Want To Hold Your Hand etc. – there’s a delicious selection of album tracks – Helter Skelter, And Your Bird Can Sing, Dear Prudence etc.- that are a delight for die-hard fans. But we’re missing classics (where is Yesterday? Eleanor Rigby? Hey Jude? Let It Be?) and I don’t think anyone’s yet satisfactorily explained why they’re missing, leaving us to surmise that they too will be dumped into the cash cow that is DLC.

That said, the graphics are beautiful, stylish and unobtrusive, and it’s wonderful to see how the guys change as their career progresses and the unique mannerisms we know so well captured so perfectly. I do agree, however, that Harmonix missed a trick by not including the option to run the original videos in the background, and the ‘studio exclusives’ were craptastic to say the least. The lack of DLC crossover doesn’t bother me; when I play B:RB I’m interested in the Beatles and pretty much nothing else, so the fact I can’t play Can’t Buy Me Love whilst RB 1 is fired up is irrelevant to me.

I think the problem here was the imbalance of hype over substance. Had the gears of the publicity machine not been so thoroughly up its own backside, and had press hyperbole and gamer anticipation not been greased so liberally, this game could’ve come out and knocked us dead. As it was, a great game has been sullied by over-expectation.

For me, it’s a 4 out of 5. But if it hadn’t have been the Beatles, I think it would’ve been an a-ok 3.