Rocksmith Review
A new kind of experience has arrived to the musical video game genre
Another key issue area with Rocksmith is that it sometimes experiences input lag. As any musician will tell you, this can be extremely frustrating. This often means that you’re trying to follow the on-screen prompts and not the music. Just as frustrating as it is for any Guitar Hero or other music game players, seeing your input not get passed to the game correctly pretty much breaks the whole experience. It doesn’t happen often and restarting the game or the song often resolves the problem, but it’s something that shouldn’t have been a problem at all. Perhaps more testing was needed at the hardware level, so if you have an input tracking problem with your particular copy of the game, there’s not much that can be done at the moment.
Rocksmith also features the ability to play minigames just to practice your string handling, as well as the chance to create custom chords. The game tracks your performance as you play a song, and points out all of the errors, though of course, anyone with experience will have already heard the riff that went wrong.
The game does feature a campaign mode as the main progression tracker. Here, you are able to boost your character and show him or her, the glamour of stardom. The presentation, solid for the most part with attractive (if basic) visuals and great audio takes a real hit on the background. You’ll most always be seeing the same odd camera swings above a crowd of people in some kind of small bar. That’s about it – you never actually get a chance to see yourself on stage or anything akin to other music games. Sure, character customization and other silly things aren’t necessary, but surely we could have at least gotten a character to represent the player on stage to show up in the game. It would have gone a long way to add some immersion. Also, another mode called Amp mode, which is a freeplay type of experience, is also included within Rocksmith. Here, you are able to let go and simply jam as well as use a variety of different pedal as well as amp settings in order to get all types of sounds and their glamorous effects.
The game does offer a multiplayer option as well. If you have a friend (and an additional guitar cord to plug into the console), it's possible to play offline with a partner. In this case, one guitar becomes lead while the other is tasked with tracking the rhythm. This can be good fun, as long as the game is able to keep up with tracking two guitars. User interface remains clean even with two players participating, so if someone makes an error the overall flow of the song isn't affected.
If nothing else, Rocksmith is a great technical achievement that will impress all those who have only ever been exposed to the arcade music genre. Playing a real guitar within the video game world is something that hasn’t been done before, and the developers at Ubisoft get full props for creating such a unique experience that almost breaks through the fourth wall. It’s disappointing, then, that most of the game’s problems come not due to the idea itself but rather the execution. Input lag is a hit and miss and could affect anyone, but most notably the automatically adjusting difficulty level means you can never be quite satisfied. Until you fully learn a riff or track on the highest difficulty that the game offers, there is no progress to hang on to and enjoy, as the game will simply bump you to the next level. Depending on how dedicated you actually are, this could be a very off-putting feature for those just trying to learn. Rocksmith is a fantastic piece of software that shows what can be done beyond the Guitar Hero era, but it’s mostly bugged down by technical and game design decisions. If there is a sequel, and one would really hope there will be, this could turn out to be an invaluable tool for the real world - and that's something almost no other game can say. As for now though, Rocksmith is a good experience that will hopefully learn from its sophomore mistakes.
Our ratings for Rocksmith on PlayStation 3 out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
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