Instead of the standard text review for Rock Band 2 for Wii, I decided to give the game a rare video review. If you’re looking for more in-depth commentary, look no further as TheSoundDefense’s comments on the game below will give you just that. Enjoy the labor of love and please read below after you finish the seventeen minute video.
TheSoundDefense’s additional comments about the game:
Score Duel is the most basic competitive multiplayer mode, akin to a Pro Face-Off from the Guitar Hero series; you and another player will play the same song, at the same time, competing to see who can get the highest score. Tug of War is rather similar, except that instead of both players playing the entire song, they’ll trade off sections, with one player playing part of the song, then the other player taking another; I found the latter mode to be a bit more fun, as you’re less likely to get tired out, plus you can watch your opponent play without worrying about your score. While both of these modes are plenty of fun, I would generally recommend that players try out Ranked Match, which matches you up with an opponent around your skill level on a randomly selected song. With the other mode, Player Match, not only are you likely to get someone either quite high above or quite below you in skill, but as NintendoGal commented, most players only ever want to play "Painkiller", "Panic Attack" and "Visions", the three hardest songs in the game. It gets tedious.
Drumming on the higher difficulties is an immensely entertaining experience, and I am completely addicted. The transition from song to note chart is a very faithful one for the most part, and while it most definitely takes practice and dedication to get up to that level, it really feels like you’re playing the song’s actual drums. The only exception is some of the metal tunes, which tend to use double bass pedals, something that Rock Band 2 has decided to eschew in favor of accessibility, but I never found this to be a real disappointment. The drumset itself is a definite improvement over the original; NintendoGal mentioned that she hits the drums rather hard when she plays, but unlike the original controller, you really don’t have to. The drum pedal has been reinforced with a thin sheet of metal to improve its sturdiness, and I found that it feels better underneath a foot than the grooved plastic pedal of yesteryear, though more similarities to a real drum pedal would be appreciated. Some gamers have complained that the drum controller has a tendency to break, and I would like to know what wrecking-ball forces they are unleashing on their poor drumsets, because I play mine into the ground and it still works fine.
The guitar, unfortunately, I have a couple more issues with. There are more guitar-intensive songs in the game this time around, which I personally like, and on the whole the hard songs are harder than they were on Rock Band; "Painkiller" has a particularly punishing solo that leaves a man’s fingers in ruins. The problem I have is with the guitar controller itself. NintendoGal mentioned the button placement in her review, and the placements themselves are fine, but if you’re playing a more difficult solo you’ll need to slide fingers across the buttons, and this is harder to achieve on a Rock Band 2 guitar with the raised separations between buttons. The strum bar is the real issue, however. It is easy to grip with its shape, but there is no satisfying "click" when you strum, or anything at all to give you feedback. Your hands won’t be able to tell if you’re strumming properly, and I can almost guarantee this will come back to bite you in fast strumming sections.
Vocals are probably the most accessible kind of fun you can have playing this game, though it really works best with songs you know. As NintendoGal said, the only real criterion the game will care about, even on Expert, is what pitch you are currently singing; you can say essentially whatever you want as long as it sounds sort of close. The game’s pitch line, indicating roughly what pitch you need to sing, is tied very closely to the vocal track of the song, including slight inflections, pitch bends, and even moments where the singer is horribly out of tune like in "Panic Attack", so on higher difficulties it’s less about singing the song and more about knowing the little intricacies of the vocal track; "Tangled Up In Blue", for this reason, is just outright mean, forcing you to sing the warblings of Bob Dylan nearly pitch-perfect. On lower difficulties, of course, it just becomes karaoke, and entertaining karaoke at that. The only real problem I have with the vocals is one that, as far as I know, is unique to me: the game doesn’t tend to recognize my normal voice during the spoken sections, which mystifies me. If I switch and sing in falsetto, however, the little round score meter lights up like the Fourth of July.
Other notes:
-When trying to perfect a song in Practice Mode, I found that when you slow the song down, it gets much harder to properly hit notes for some reason, especially on drums. I ended up just repeating sections at full speed in order to get them down.
-The auto-calibration tools do not work quite as well as I would like them to, inserting a tiny bit of lag. While they’ll do just fine if you’ve got a projector setup or something similar, on most TVs you can just set the offset to 0 and be done with it.
-The "all songs" cheat, and any other cheats relevant to partygoers, should be available from the start without the use of codes. The "pick-up-and-playability" of party games is very important, and speaking from experience, it’s frustrating when a Rock Band event is put on hold as someone looks for the cheat to unlock all songs.
