At one point the music rhythm genrehad become a worldwide phenomenon, letting millions of people feel like rock legends by simply matching colors on screen with the buttons on a plastic guitar. Only years later, various developers tried to expand their products by introducing real instruments into the mix, but ultimately failed due to an exhausted market, bad ideas, and simply not understanding their demographic. Now, BandFuse: Rock Legends takes the stage with ambition of its own, but instead of pushing the illusion of being a rock hero simulator, it’s looking to train you to be one.
Forget the plastic instruments cluttering up your closet, BandFuse uses your real guitar, bass, and/or mic to learn various songs, exactly how they were meant to be played. Getting my hands on the game for a good amount of time, as well as talking about the game with one of the developers, BandFuse really is designed to walk you through every stage of learning an instrument. Using various videos and internal programs, the game includes a polyphonic tuner, tutorials, as well as a break down of the parts of a guitar by famous guitarist, Slash.
Once you are ready to start picking away at your guitar or bass, BandFuse gives you a wide range of helpful tools to teach you how to get through the song of your choice. The game makes a strong effort to take you through understanding the game’s tablature setup so you understand the language of music before being dropped in the deep end. In practice mode you can choose a segment of any given song before choosing your play speed and difficulty. Starting out at a mere percentage of the pace, the game will slowly step up the speed as you begin to master the portion. If you start to show signs of struggle the pace will maintain itself as to not overwhelm you. It’s very intuitive by design.
Advanced players, or anyone who wants to know more about the more difficult skills of playing such as slides, bends, or tapping, will have an opportunity to develop these skills. No matter how long you’ve been playing there is something to take away from BandFuse‘s experience.
Moving onto the career mode, it works very similar to what rhythm fans have become accustomed to. Starting out with the easier songs, you need to earn cash to unlock bigger venues and more challenging musical pieces. Although I only played the game on lower difficulties, the game felt like it adapted to my skill level. It was like having a professional musician teach me without all the confusing communication.
Looking at everything BandFuse: Rock Legends offers, it’s hilarious to think back to the days when I used to feel amazing beating something on a plastic guitar. This game is not about faking anything, and while there is hand-holding, this is the real deal. It will take determination and the will to play to successfully complete all 19 included tracks. You can do it, but only if you’re willing to put in the time.
BandFuse: Rock Legends will hit store shelves November 19th.
