I’d been putting off picking this up for a while – the £180 price tag did seem pretty steep for a game! OK so you get a guitar and drum kit (not real ones of course!). Well I have guitar, which I got with Guitar Hero 2, and thankfully it’s compatible with Rock Band so I went for the cheap option and picked up the game without the instruments (solus).

After the massive, bloated disappointment of Guitar Hero 3, this is a total joy. The core principle of the game is more or less identical to Guitar Hero, so why is it so much better than Guitar Hero 3? Well the tracklist is very, very good, oddly enough having less metal and “rawk” seems to improve things. Secondly the note patterns match the songs very well, you actually feel like you are actually playing the song, and it’s fun. Most of the time Guitar Hero 3 feels like that old kids game Simon and you are merely matching colored symbols on the screen to button presses. Now of course that is what you are doing – but Harmonix, the guys behind Rock Band (and Guitar Hero 2 before it) somehow are able to make this simple thing feel like you are musical genius.

Another good thing – lots of downloadable extra tracks, stuff like classic Bowie, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Queens of the Stone Age, Pixies. In the main it’s good stuff, so I’ve already spent a fair bit on this stuff.

So now do I splash out and pick up the instrument pack so I can have a bash on the drums?!