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Going into this, I already play at expert level on the original Rock Band. I've held that Rock Band really was the best thing you could get in the music gaming genre for the past year, since it came out. When it hit the market, it pretty much showed us what Guitar Hero 3 should have been. Harmonix, having popularized the genre in the US, has decided to build on success instead of just giving fans a pure cash-in.
The best part about playing Rock Band was the experience of getting your friends together, cranking out some custom characters and putting them up on stage to rock in a room together until your arms and throat hurt. Rock Band 2 took this to the next level by allowing you to get your friends together from around the country to keep it going; for me, this solved a problem before it even happened, now that I'm moved out from some of my best friends.
Likewise, it fixed some of the biggest annoyances I had with the original Rock Band. In the original Rock Band, if you played solo tour, it made you go through a straight set-list type of game play like in Guitar Hero. Now, if you want to rock solo for a bit to build up a character and your own skills, you can hit up all the best features of the Band World Tour. However, at any time, your friend can jump in and help you knock out a few troublesome songs in the road to rock glory.
In Rock Band 1, if you didn't have a full band of friends, either playing solo or rocking out without a drummer or vocalist with your fellow guitarist friend, the game would assign you the dumbest looking pre-made characters to go along with your carefully constructed rock image. So, you and your buddy are metal or punk, and in comes some bubble-gum colored prog-techno-fusion lead singer to make you look like a joke as you frantically look for a song with a female lead singer so you can get rid of him.
In Rock Band 2, you can create a character with whatever instrument you want, deck him or her out with whatever gear you want, and assign him or her to fill in any slot in the band if you're not playing as that character. Even while doing solo play I can keep my punk rock credentials in full force, surrounded by other individuals who lack respect for fashion authority.
The game lets you keep all your downloaded tracks from Rock Band 1, if you're my old roommate who had to have spent more on tracks than on the actual game's special edition, this is a welcome thing to hear. You can also port all but 2 or 3 tracks from the first Rock Band after buying an export license for 400 Microsoft Points, which is about $5; you can export the tracks to your hard drive, and if you like everything Rock Band 2 gives you, then you can feel free to trade in RB1, unless you love "Enter Sandman" or "Run to the Hills" that much.
The downside to this? Well, Rock Band 2 has a huge soundtrack of about 80 plus songs. With Rock Band 1's list, it's around 130 songs spanning innumerable bands. So there are tons of awesome tracks, and a few turds in the punch bowl. Linkin Park's song, "One Step Closer," was horrible to listen to and annoying to play and "Pinball Wizard" is the bane of my existence, though it is much easier to listen to. Basically, the track list has to be relatively open to all kinds of rock, and so not every song is for everyone.
Certainly, besides the fact that no set list that spans the wide range of rock out there will fail to please everyone 100 percent, it does seem a bit odd to have a goth band playing Journey or a metal band playing Fleetwood Mac. It seems the 'character' of the band can certainly become incongruous and lead to incredible laughing instead of the incredible feeling of performing.
All being said, with graphical improvements, a gigantic list of songs available for play right out of the box, the ability to hand pick a band, play with friends in your living room or around the world, increased character customization, backwards compatibility with old downloads, and all of this built on top of a formula that is the best of the genre, Rock Band 2 is an easy 9.5 out of 10.
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