AC/DC Live: Rock Band Track Pack
Score: 73% ESRB: Teen Publisher: EA Games Developer: Harmonix Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 - 4 Genre: Rhythm/ Party
Graphics & Sound: It started with Aerosmith, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith that is. Normal music games just weren't elite enough. Before long if you don't have your own music game, you're just not going to be cool enough. The newest of these is AC/DC Live: Rock Band Track Pack. Graphically, it is not exactly what I was expecting. One big noticeable thing is that the character creator is gone. If you enjoy making your characters, you'll just have to forget about that for now. My assumption was that you couldn't create your character because the band was going to look like AC/DC. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you don't want to see those guys), that is not the case. The characters are randomly generated from all the character choices in Rock Band each time you start up the Tour or Quickplay. There's not really much noteworthy about the sets either. Music games are all about the music, though. AC/DC Live has 18 songs total, all of them performed live. Overall, I would say it's a good selection of AC/DC songs too. The obvious favorites like "Highway to Hell" and "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" are on there. The one song that I really wanted on there that is missing is "Who Made Who," but I guess we can't always get everything we want.
Gameplay: When you first start up the game, you've got the options of Solo or Multiplayer. Both of them have the Tour and Quickplay available. Multiplayer also has Tug of War and Score Duel for you to play. AC/DC Live: Rock Band Track Pack uses the original Rock Band engine. This means that when you go on tour, you have to have a band leader. That leader always has to be a part of the band to use that band on tour. It's quite a pain at times if no one wants to play that character. It also means that you'll have to have three different characters for the Solo Tour, one for each instrument. The tour is slightly different too. You get the songs in order one at a time. There's no choosing between four songs to play each time. Since there aren't any fans to accumulate either, there's really not much reason to play the tour. One really nice thing is that all the songs are unlocked for Quickplay as soon as you start the game. This means that you really have no reason to tour at all. You'll probably spend all of your time in Quickplay, at least I did. You simply choose a song and play it. You can't beat that for simplicity and ease. The one other mode that you'll probably spend time in, at least when you get stuck on something, is Training. Here, you can go through tutorials on how to play if you need to learn. You can also practice any song in the game, without failing if you don't do well enough. It is especially helpful for those times when you just can't get past a certain part and need to see what it is like all the way through. If you find your timing is just off, you can try to calibrate the system from the Options. On some TV sets, you'll find calibration is a necessity!
Difficulty: Overall, the difficulty of the songs on guitar and drums in AC/DC Live: Rock Band Track Pack is about the same as the rest of the Rock Band songs. The very first songs on Expert felt a little easier than normal, but that ended quickly. The last few are quite difficult (more difficult than I can do). If you've ever heard AC/DC, you know how unique Brian Johnson's voice is. This is not easy to imitate while you're playing the game, no matter how well you know the songs. Personally, I found the vocals to be more difficult than most Rock Band songs. It took me a lot longer to get them perfect than it normally does when I download new songs. I also found the achievements difficult to get. Four of them (105 out of 250 points) require you to get 100% of something on Expert. One of those is *only* 100% of the notes on a guitar solo on Expert. But seriously, I know very few people that can get 100% of the notes on the drums, which is another. Another one requires you to get 100% of notes as a bassist upstrumming only. Very few of them can be easily achieved for non-expert players.
Game Mechanics: AC/DC Live: Rock Band Track Pack plays exactly like all the other Rock Band games. The nice thing about it is that even though it's a track pack that you can import the songs into Rock Band from, you can also play it as a standalone game. You don't even need a copy of Rock Band to play. You just put the game in and rock away. If you've never played Rock Band before, well it's not that hard to learn how. Mastering it will take you some time, though. Basically you'll see notes scrolling up the screen. For the guitar, hold down the colored button that matches the note and then strum the strum bar when the note gets to the target line. For the drums, you just have to hit that color drum as the note gets to the target line. The vocals will be scrolling across the top of the screen. There is an arrow showing you where you are singing and a line that shows where you should be singing. Just hit the right pitch to make the arrow follow the line. AC/DC Live: Rock Band Track Pack just wasn't as exciting as I thought it was going to be. With the difficulty of the achievements for non-expert players, I am guessing that most people are only going to buy the game to import the songs into Rock Band anyway. The game comes with a code that can be used for one import. Since these songs aren't available for download, the only way you're going to get them is by buying this pack. The price is the same as if you bought each song for download individually. Given that, unless you're a huge AC/DC fan or dying for these songs, you'll probably not have a reason for buying this track pack.
-Cyn, GameVortex Communications AKA Sara Earl
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