There’s hardly anything to say about Rock Band 2 that you can’t discover from its Wikipedia page. It’s the first game with nothing drastically changed, only improved slightly. Chords can be hammer-ons or pull-offs, which are now easier to see; the track list I think is much better, with very few songs that I don’t want to play, as opposed to the handful in its predecessor that I groaned at when forced to play. As well, the game has been boiled down to its core elements and time has been spent focused on what the sequel retained, adding depth to all that has survived. Career mode is no longer just playing through the on-disc songs in sequence; whether alone or in a band, the only forms of playing this game are in a rebuffed version of the first game’s World Tour mode or Quickplay.

Rock Band 2 forces its players to enjoy the experience the designers intended, and it comes off better for it. With the first game, I had a few characters (enough for each instrument to be played in Career) and breezed through the setlist. In this game, you make a band, and then make a character, and that band, no matter its makeup, goes through World Tour mode in order to unlock all of the songs. You must play in different cities and venues and complete various challenges to unlock different cities with different songs, etc etc.

Rock Band 2 is a solid game, and from what I hear, the peripherals are all improved as well. I know the drums are better, but I’ve yet to even see, let alone play with, the new guitar. Harmonix definitely had its end-users in mind when creating every aspect of Rock Band 2. They know their game is a fun band-like experience now in World Tour mode, but even Quickplay has its improvements. Players creating their own setlists and turning on ‘no fail’ mode is pretty much guaranteeing the game’s success at a party.

I’m glad to say that this game is even better than the first. Rock Band was fun, but it definitely had its fair share of requested fixes and additions, and Harmonix has listened to their fans and done what was asked of them, which is a great thing to say of any development team. With the sequel, we are not just paying for a chunk of songs at a time, but all of the little details that make exporting the first game in order to be played via the Rock Band 2 disc totally worthwhile.