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Beatles Rock Band initially struck me as an oddity that I couldn’t grasp initially.  Not being an avid Beatles fan, I could not see the reason for such a product.  Why devote an entire games just to one group, why tailor the product just for this one band.  They already have Rock Band 2, why not a Rock Band 3 with some of these new features added in?

Well, then the day before the release I got a knock on my door with the Fedex guy, here he was with my very own copy of Beatles Rock Band for review.  Now this review is a little late out the door, but if you share the life I do, you’ll understand why.  But we did get to play the game and I tell you, it was understandable why this needed it’s own title. 

Well, I invited my kids, and my brothers over for a night and we put this bad boy in the 360.  The unified comment for the night was “Wait, that song was theirs?”  During the week comings up I was listening to Major Nelson’s podcast and he saw a similar phenomenon.  With the Beatles being such an older band, all of us in the room had never been apart of the Beatlemania that swept the nation.  Over time you loose who sang what as newer bands do covers.  Heck, first time I heard “Come Together,” it was a cover in a different style so as hearing the original surprised me.

Now the kit was a bare bones one as I already had my ION Drum Rocker, two wireless guitars and a microphone.  They sent me a pair of microphones and the game disk.  The kids were happy to grab a microphone each, something they fought over in past games of Rock Band 1/2.  I took on the task of Drums, something I wonder if I’ll ever master.  Finally I had two brothers taking the Bass/Guitar.  With the band in position, we started to play.

The first thing we did was hit the calibration screen after telling it the Hard Disk was a good place to store our data.  Calibration was hard only because your usual in-house calibrator was MIA for this, after a few tries I managed to get the numbers to something closer to what I expected for Rock Band 2 (turned out fine).  I tell you, for someone who wants to play drums here, I suck at following the metronome, although I feel somewhat vindicated that my oldest daughter was far worse.  The screen itself is just a revamp of Rock Band 2, not like there was much room for improvement.

The main menu started with ‘Quick Play’ which led us to ‘local’ or ‘xbox live’.  we chose local which combined both solo and multiplayer in one.  During every screen where to vocalist has to either join in or select a difficulty level, you are greeted with a level indicator for each microphone.  The first plugged in is the first mic and so on.  So, if you don’t want to start the biggest wire tangle in history, you can just plug them in the order you want at any time  (Or you can pick up a set of the wireless mics).

Game play is very similar to Rock Band 1/2 if that’s what you’re used to.  Overdrive has been renamed to Beatlemania and reduced to a single note.  You don’t get to ‘rock out’ at that point, but I have hit the foot pedal on that note with the green pad (extra note) with no penalty, so I gather it’s a little forgiving on the drums.  As for guitar/bass, it’s identical.  My band mates made the transition painlessly.  Vocals are the same too with the exception that the second and third microphones were able to trigger the over-er, ah Beatlemania.

The biggest change to the game play is the second and third singers.  This is harmony baby, and with that, different levels.  The third singer is the highest note-wise, with the seconds pretty much dead middle between the two.  This proved to be a novel but not ungraspable concept for the kids.  With the oldest in charge, the other two were quickly put in line.  As for quality, well, that suffered a little with our brave group of inexperienced harmonizers.  Gone are the three level controllers for the vocals, but replaced with the three different microphone volume levels. The band’s vocals and the mic sensitivity are now in the options on the main menu and the ‘start’ menu respectively.

Quickplay is great for parties and getting people playing, but if you have a handful of band mates you might want to try out the story mode.  This mode allows you to play songs, unlocking up to two photos per song.  Getting three stars will get you the first photo, and five will score you both.  Complete a ‘chapter’ of songs and you gain more additional content.  The photos they show on the page are cropped thumbs so it’s worth looking at each on the menus when you can. 

So in the end, this is a very playable variant to the Rock Band line.  To do the things they have in here they had to create a different ‘title’.  Without it, it would not be the same.  Should they port the extra functionality over to the main Rock Band line?  Yes.  If Rock Band 3 comes with any less, I as a avid Rock Band fan would be disappointed.  This title will appeal to even the casual Beatle fans, of which there are many.  Should they let you port the game content to RB2 or the future RB3?  Probably not.  It’s the whole experience that makes the game here.