With the oversaturated and ailing rhythm game genre in a state of decline, it seems ill-timed to launch a new guitar-focused music franchise. But Ubisoft has pulled one out of left field with Rocksmith–a guitar game that successfully bridges the gap between musical gaming and actual rocking. It’s advanced enough to give seasoned guitar players a more realistic challenge than Rock Band or Guitar Hero, yet accessible enough to teach inexperienced guitarists the ropes of rock and roll.
There are a few minor hurdles to get through before you get rocking. Rocksmith requires you to own an actual six-string electric guitar and won’t work with any old plastic peripherals you have lying around. It’s a great excuse to dust off the old axe if you have one, but the high cost of picking up the Epiphone bundle or a separate guitar will be prohibitive for some players. That said, wielding an honest-to-goodness instrument of rock is what makes this game so fun. Once you have the requisite guitar in hand, you plug it into your system using the included 1/4-inch adapter cable, but it takes some fiddling to get a comfortable response time between the visual and audio lag. Running the sound out via analog audio cables into a stereo offers the best performance, though there are a few different options to explore. Once you get that mess sorted out, it’s time to melt faces. Well, eventually.
Rocksmith’s light campaign mode eases you into tunes by having you practice small groups of songs to get a feel for them before playing the more advanced versions back-to-back in concert at packed venues. It starts you off at the ground floor with simple licks, single notes, and slow pacing to get you accustomed to the basics of guitar playing and how to decipher the elaborate note runway. Each guitar string is associated with a different color, and the numbered fretboard onscreen indicates the corresponding location you’re supposed to play on the guitar. The gameplay is reasonably lenient, since you can’t “fail” mid-song for performing poorly. You may have to replay a tune if you don’t reach a certain minimum point score by the end, but repetition is required for learning, and it’s a common theme across much of Rocksmith. You’re good to go as long as you hit the right notes or chords when prompted when they come down the runway. What’s awesome is that you’re not docked points for noodling. For folks who already have some level of guitar skill, this is one element that Rock Band and Guitar Herosorely lacked. Even better: the game scales to your playing ability automatically. If you start nailing power chords instead of single notes, you’ll level up the phrasing and soon start seeing chords coming down the screen at you. The reverse happens if you mess up too much, giving you a chance to recover if things get too busy for you. It’s a very cool, dynamic system that’s forgiving without gutting the challenge.
