Rock Band is an incredibly popular game on consoles, which is evidenced by the $1 billion in revenue it has collected over the years. While Rock Band is inarguably a top-notch console title, does it translate well to the iPhone? I downloaded the Rock Band app for the iPhone ($9.99, iTunes link) to see if it’s worth the hefty price tag.
Rock Band boasts a ridiculously impressive array of features. Users have the choice to play solo, link up with 2 to 4 friends via Bluetooth (3G and 3GS only), or create a “band” on Facebook. You can receive messages right in the app, and enable push notifications so you’ll be notified automatically when friends are ready to play.
The app includes 15 free songs, and you can unlock five more. Rock Band supports in-app purchases, so you can buy additional songs once you get tired of the first 20 (which won’t take very long). Each song includes vocal, guitar, bass and drum tracks; you can also choose between three levels of difficulty for each song. Each of the tracks is played by tapping, which makes sense for everything but the vocals. I would recommend skipping the vocal tracks altogether — tapping the vocals is pretty lame and not all that fun if I’m being honest.
Whichever track you choose, you’ll be tapping on one of four pads that correspond to one of the sliding notes. The drums, guitar and bass have a horizontal orientation along the bottom of the iPhone, while the vocals are laid out horizontally (see above). The problem is that you end up doing all the tapping with your thumbs, which gets very tiring after awhile. Unfortunately, it’s just not that comfortable to frantically tap and slide your thumbs around the bottom of the iPhone. Landscape mode would help enormously in alleviating this problem.
You also have much less time to react to the notes than you do in the console game, as they slide pretty fast on the iPhone’s screen. And then there’s the overdrive graphic, which lands right in the middle of your screen. The graphic tells you to shake your iPhone to go into overdrive mode, but that pesky little graphic has disrupted my concentration more than once.
Be aware that Rock Band is a large app (158 MB plus songs), and it took at least five minutes to download over a wireless connection. It also takes a good while for each song to load.
Conclusion
Overall, we recommend Rock Band for the iPhone, and we give it an overall score of 7.5 out of 10. It has a slick, elegant design that puts many iPhone apps to shame, and the game is almost as addicting as the real thing. That said, you should keep your expectations in check — tap, tap, tapping on the iPhone isn’t nearly as fun as strumming a fake guitar or belting out your favorite song into a microphone.
At $10, it’s also a large commitment, especially considering that user favorite Tap Tap Revenge 3 is priced at a reasonable $0.99. The developers could easily make Rock Band a better value by adding more free songs (and hopefully landscape mode?) to a future update.
Rock Band is a $9.99 download from the iTunes store.