I came away from my first experience with Konami's "Rock Revolution" a bit frustrated. The drums, while pleasantly complex, were daunting on the first go round.
E3 provided another opportunity to step up to the plate. Six buttons and a kick pedal or not, I wanted to slide up the difficulty settings and put the drum set to the test.
Last time, I played on easy. Piece of cake. This round, I picked Blink 182's "All The Small Things," ratcheted up the difficulty an unprecedented medium. How did I fare? Better, but I still ran into some of the same issues from before…
"Rock Revolution" features more drum pads than its competition. I'm still trying to figure out whether that's a good thing. While it means there's an opportunity to more faithfully reproduce the drumming experience, the condensed design means it's difficult to discern where you should be hitting while playing "Rock Revolution," a reoccurring problem I noticed while watching others play the game.
That was the biggest problem when I first tried "Rock Revolution" and it still rings true. It felt like I smacking the plastic around the pads more often than I was hitting the pads themselves. And whose idea was it to make a gray drum pad, when the interface features a transparent black background? Most of the time I couldn't even see that note!
That said, the moments I was able to hit the drum pads properly, "Rock Revolution" proved fun. Having that many drum pads makes for a wildly different experience than "Rock Band" can offer -- right now, at least. I can see some people picking up "Rock Revolution" just for the hardcore drumming experience, but that's partially contingent on pricing, something they're not yet talking about.
I still haven't touched the guitar, but it doesn't look any different from what you'd get out of "Rock Band" or "Guitar Hero." It seems "Rock Revolution"'s success will live or die on the appeal of its unique drum set and its still unannounced price.
[Full disclosure: Another arm of our company, MTV Games ,develops and publishes "Rock Band."]
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