Online
We've spent a lot of time testing a preview version of Rock Band over the last few weeks, but one area of the game that's remained a mystery is the online play, from playing as a band to one-on-one duels to leaderboards. Now that we're playing the retail game, we can see the online features have their ups and downs: some aspects could clearly be improved, but what's here at least works decently.
To start, there are two head-to-head multiplayer modes: Tug of War and Score Duel. Each can be played with any of the game's four instruments, and are easily equated to the Face-Off and Pro Face-Off modes from the Guitar Hero series.
In Tug of War, players trade phrases back and forth, and a meter on the left shows who's doing better. In this mode, there's no score and players can choose different difficulties, making it sort of a casual mode when you have players of varying skill levels who want to play each other. Score Duel is the more serious of the two, where both competitors play the entire song from start to finish on the same skill level and fight for the highest score.
The good news is that all our matches to date have been lag-free. The bad news is that finding people to play may be a little tough. What Rock Band really needs is a browser showing everyone looking for games, regardless of mode or instrument. Instead, you can only load up a mode and instrument and then hope someone else is looking to play the same thing, which is a less than optimal solution.
The other main way to play online is as part of a band. As mentioned earlier, only Quickplay is available online and not the Band World Tour, which is a pretty huge bummer. But Quickplay matches work pretty well, assuming you arrange them in advance. Once again, they've been lag-free for us, and the bigger issue has been dealing with the lack of a browser showing available players.
Rock Band has a number of online leaderboards, covering everything from high scores for individual songs on each instrument to Band World Tour stats such as most accumulated stars and fans. There's a lot to sort through and it probably should have been organized a bit better, but it gets the job done. The main problem at the moment is the same one we're currently having with Guitar Hero III: the leaderboards seem to go up and down randomly, often failing to update scores.
