Amidst the huge Beatles Rock Band commotion at the MTV booth, there was also a line of PSPs containing the upcoming Rock Band Unplugged game that comes out later next week. I was a little curious about the game because I’d played Amplitude but was wondering how this concept would be carried over to multiple instruments. After getting my hands on the game, I was actually quite pleased with the product on the show floor as it introduced an added strategy element to the frantic button pressing of Amplitude.
With four different instruments throwing notes at you at the same time, it’s obviously impossible to play each of the instruments at once. Thus, players must juggle between instruments using the left and right triggers. Each instrument has the potential to fail and be out for the time being (thus invoking the need to be saved using saved up star power), but to prevent missing notes in a segment, players must be both quick and very accurate; the quicker you deal with a string of notes, the better, and if you can manage to perfect a small riff on any of the four instruments, it will take away notes from that instrument for a few segments after.
I first played this on Medium and picked it up pretty well but after jumping straight to Expert, I soon realized how confusing (but fun) that the game could be. The music sounded great as well, as one would expect from a PSP title, and the overall presentation looked good as well. Also, with 40 songs in the game and 10 songs available for downloadable content at launch, this game should also receive good online support like its console counterparts. We’ll be ready for the game next week so stay tuned for more information on its launch.
