Harmonix finally jumped into the band-specific game waters and, boy, did they ever land a huge catch on their first try. Getting a chance to make a game about arguably the most successful and popular band of all-time, The Beatles: Rock Band certainly set them up with extremely high expectations.

Good news. Harmonix doesn’t disappoint, delivering a great music game that sets a new standard for developers looking to release a game about just one band.

The Story Mode in The Beatles: Rock Band doesn’t really tell you the story of The Beatles, but just presents their career in about 44 songs across six iconic locations and lets you piece together the story as you see it. It was amazing to see how much this group evolved in just about six or seven years, from clean-shaven young men singing pop songs about girls and cars to mature men with beards and mustaches singing about their life experiences and the issues they thought were important before they broke up at the end of the 1960’s.

Progression through the story mode is marked by your collection of photos, which is done by getting three or five stars in each of the songs and completing the chapter challenges. Each of these photos also contains information or a fact relating to the song or location where you unlocked it, but they also unlock a few interesting videos at certain milestones that should be nice rewards for Beatles fans.

Harmonix did a great job in picking the songs that would be in The Beatles: Rock Band, as they picked the most notable tracks from each album along with songs that fit the Rock Band mold well. All of the songs – centered on iconic locations like The Cavern, The Ed Sullivan Show, Shea Stadium, Budokan, and the rooftop of the Apple Corps Headquarters – feature a great amount of atmospheric touches like cuts to screaming girls, views of crowds, and even security or cops when they were present.

The most interesting songs in The Beatles: Rock Band definitely are the ones that take place in Abbey Roads Studios, when the group went through a weird, though amazing transformation in the songs they were making that is well-represented in visual form, called Dreamscapes. These Dreamscapes range from more subdued visual representations for “Birthday” and “Revolution” while “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “I Am the Walrus” are expectedly weird and awesome. They can be a bit hard to not want to watch while you’re trying to keep your eye on the highway, so they may be a bit too effective. Luckily, there is a Performance Mode in the options menu that takes away the bulky part of the HUD that can be used in conjunction with No Fail Mode to let you watch them without those pesky game elements getting in the way.

Harmonix also added some new gameplay features to spruce up the game portion of The Beatles: Rock Band. The major new addition is the vocal harmony feature that lets up to three people sing and attempt to emulate the harmonies that The Beatles had in a lot of their songs, which are represented by three lines when more than one person is singing at a time. It’s a bit hard to get adjusted to the harmonies at first since it requires three people to actually coordinate, but it gets to be a lot of fun once you get in sync with each other. To add to that, the game will give you a countdown when resuming a paused game to give you a chance to not mess up right away.

Outside of Story Mode, you have Quickplay, Score Duel, and Tug of War along with a new Drum Trainer Mode that lets you practice any of Ringo’s signature beats outside of the songs.

The biggest issue that you will have to concern yourself with in deciding whether to purchase The Beatles: Rock Band outside of your interest in the legendary band, is if this game offers the difficulty or challenge associated with other Rock Band releases. By virtue of it being The Beatles, it’s a basic fact that none of the songs here will really challenge you if you’ve mastered previous games and if that’s the only interest you have in games of this nature, this will really not be the game for you.

There is the continued support of Rock Band DLC that can help keep you busy with mastering songs as they come out. For everyone else that finds their limits in the other difficulties will also find this to be a little easy, but will also have the higher difficulties to work through and may have an easier time doing that here than in either of the first two Rock Band games. For the most part, interest in the music should be the main motivator for you rather than challenge.

The Beatles: Rock Band is gorgeous and possibly the best-looking music game to date. Of course, that has a lot to do with Harmonix only needing to focus on just four characters rather than the millions of combinations that players can come up with, but even that doesn’t necessarily mean that the minute details like swaying hair, mannerisms, clothing styles that change from song to song, and more that you’ll notice as you play through the story mode. The Dreamscapes are just absolutely stunning with each one being unique and very fitting that go much further than would have been acceptable. There is a bit of a potential issue that may affect some players, in that notes can be hard to see for people with vision problems when your stored overdrive is in effect on the note highway. The music itself is great and the ability to play lead or bass guitar, drums, or sing adds a lot of appreciation to the individual merits that each member added to each song.

While it may not have the flexibility that you’d expect from a Rock Band game, the package itself is enticing enough that The Beatles: Rock Band could become the center of a party, just like your beefy Rock Band DLC collection. The only real exceptions to this very widely-appealing game are those only looking for a challenge and those that are close-minded to thought of liking this music.

The Beatles: Rock Band is a great music game, a new standard for band-specific games and, unlike previous incarnations of the franchise, not even all about the gameplay itself. As a piece of fan service and an introductory guide to The Beatles for a new generation, The Beatles: Rock Band is a fantastic experience.

Final Score: 9.3 | Recommendation: Buy It

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