Game review: Rock Band Blitz, X Box Live

IT’S weird to imagine playing a Rock Band game without plastic instruments, but developer Harmonix has proven that it can make the format work in any setting.

Going back to the studio’s roots, Rock Band Blitz is like an evolution of the team’s earliest games Frequency and Amplitude than a full-blown extension of its core series.

You get 25 songs as part of the initial download, and you can even import all of your existing Rock Band DLC, meaning you could have hundreds of tracks to play from day one. Each song sees you controlling a marker that speeds along a city street.

Notes will fly down the road in time with the music and rather than aiming to hit them all accurately – as per previous Rock Band games – your aim here is to maximise your score by switching between the track’s component parts and hitting the sections with the most notes. So if it’s a keyboard heavy song, you would naturally hit the keyboard track most, and so on.

However, you need to make sure you don’t ignore other parts of the composition in order to push up your score multiplier. So success becomes a juggling act between hitting note-heavy sections and pushing up weaker tracks too. It’s frantic and tiresome on the thumbs, just like all good arcade games should be.

Throw in strategic power ups and you have a fun experience that offers huge replay value. Music lovers need look no further.

Rock Band Blitz

1,200 MS Points (around £7.99), Xbox Live Arcade