Band World Tour

While playing single songs as a band is fun, Rock Band's marquee mode is the Band World Tour. In this mode, you create a group of up to four players, customize each character (check our other section for more on that), pick a home city and begin the process of dominating the world. Each city has three different-sized venues, and as you complete challenges, you gain fans and unlock new gigs and larger venues to play in.

The progression through the Band World Tour is pretty straightforward. Your first few gigs are simply to play a single song and to get a good score on it. Depending on how you do, you'll accumulate fans and stars based on your ratings, which in turn unlock new gigs, other venues and eventually other cities.

The gigs fall into a few categories. Beyond single songs, you'll often be able to create your own setlists of two or more songs, which is a nice way to rack up stars and fans with songs you know your band can rock. Slightly more dangerous are mystery setlists, where you might get stuck with extremely hard songs and the danger of losing fans if your band fails out. Soon, the setlists get much longer, being five songs or higher, to the point where you can spend an hour or more playing through a single gig. The ultimate challenge is the Endless Setlist, in which you're tasked with playing through all 58 songs in one sitting.

It's not immediately obvious, but there is a core path through the World Tour. Once you hit certain thresholds, special gigs unlock that give you a van, or a manager, or a jet, or a PR firm, eventually leading to a chance to make the Hall of Fame. These gigs are marked with a special icon in the setlist, which spares you the trouble of trying to remember which city or venue it might be in. Some later gigs up the ante by requiring the entire band plays on the Hard difficulty or higher, but these are Rock Band's equivalent of side quests; the actual 8-song Hall of Fame event allows the band to play on Medium, so even a band of average skill should be able to complete the tour by maxing out the songs they're good at.

One downside of the World Tour is that you end up playing the same songs a lot. A typical city has three venues, five gigs in each, and at least a few of those gigs will be five to 10 songs long. That means any given city could require 30-60 songs; with nine cities, and harder songs not unlocking until certain points in the game, it won't be uncommon for bands to play the same song 10-20 times before reaching the Hall of Fame event.

This could be offset somewhat by the release of downloadable content, which started the day of Rock Band's launch and is scheduled weekly at least through the end of the calendar year. Downloaded content won't show up in the preset gigs, but is fair game to appear in custom and mystery setlists, so if you just can't bear playing "Creep" one more time, it shouldn't be long before you have some options.

But the biggest problem with the Band World Tour is that it's not available for play online. It's the game's centerpiece -- the leaderboards have rankings for total stars and fans accumulated in the BWT -- but the only way to play it is by packing three or four people in a room. There's no doubt plenty of people will do just that, but when you're talking about 30 hours or more to get through the tour and a healthy amount of side gigs, trying to coordinate friends to play regularly becomes a bit of a challenge. A patch adding online support is rumored for some point in the future, but for the time being, the dreams we had of building online supergroups with friends across the country will have to go on hold.

That quibble aside, the Band World Tour is an impressive step up from the traditional setlist structure seen in other music and rhythm games. The structure of the tour forces the band to strategize on which gigs they should take and what difficulty levels everyone should use, and there are special thrills you'll get from completing extra long gigs. It's an impressive achievement, to say the least.