Rock Band: AC/DC Track Pack

AC/DC Live Rock Band Track Pack: An 18-track edition of Rock Band based on the Live at Donington album.

Story : In the beginning back in 1955, man didn’t know about a rock ‘n roll or any of that jive for that matter. The white man had the schmaltz and the black man had the blues; no one knew what they were going to do but Tchaikovsky had the news! He said “Let there be sound” and there was sound. He then proclaimed “Let there be light” and there was indeed light. “Let there be drums” he screams, and thus there was drums. He demanded that perhaps “Let there be guitar”, which led to there being guitar. And then he shouted “Let there be Rock!”

Tchaiskovsky passed away in November of 1893, further adding to the strangeness of the song.

The game part of the AC/DC track pack is a very bare-bones package. All of the menus and visual content come straight out of the Rock Band 1 disc. There’s no World Tour option (thankfully), no online play, no “No Fail mode” (unthankfully), only one virtual stage to play on (The Russian arena, of all venues) and you can’t create virtual bandmates, let alone even choose them. The game randomly selects virtual performers to display on stage, and it seemed strange for me to see the afro-toting disco singer take the place of Brian Johnson.

The most glaring disappointment for me when it came to the AC/DC Rock Band pack was the decided lack of AC/DC. The songs are there, Angus Young is on the cover of the box as he’s just about to rock and subsequently salute those about to do the same, and the title screen is consisted of a glowing AC/DC logo, but that’s about the extent of it. You don’t see any virtual band members playing, let alone photos of the band, or bios, or videos, or anything else in relation to AC/DC. Even the instruction manual bears little mention of AC/DC. When you finish the solo tour, the game congratulates you on playing alongside AC/DC, which seemed a bit short-sighted; the hotel clerk who renigns an entire floor for the band and their groupies had more of a time rocking out with AC/DC than I did playing this game.

Playing this game, however, I didn’t know if I should make the statement that Harmonix is better at music games than Neversoft is with Guitar Hero, or if perhaps AC/DC is just a better band than Aerosmith, because where the latter band’s game became repetitive from playing the same simple style of songs repeatedly, this track pack seems to stay fresh and fun from start to finish. All of the songs are fan-favorites, and almost all of them have a mean average of 2.5 guitar solos, high-pitched vocal clips and a Big Rock Finish. The end to Let There Be Rock is particularly long and grueling, worth a whopping 50,000 points by itself when I was playing guitar. Being that all of the songs are based on the live show, you get a couple of lengthy songs (Jailbreak for example) with simmered down moments for the crowd to go wild and gamers who play music games to live out their rock star dreams getting plenty of chances to soak in their glory, while kid sisters can roll their eyes behind their heads with confusion as to what the big deal is.

There’s only 18 songs, and you’ll have played them all in about 90 minutes. The best part of the AC/DC track pack is not having to play it; the back of the manual has a code that lets you download the songs onto your hard drive for use with a real Rock Band game. The code is a one-time use deal, and while I understand wanting to combat the used game market or not wanting gamers to share codes with their friends, bad things can happen to prone Xbox 360 hard drives. And this is a code to download off of a Harmonix server (slowly, I might add) as opposed to ripping the data from the game disc, which begs the question of “why did I even buy the disc in the first place?”

There’s no logical way to sum up this review other than in the most uninspired video game review line possible; “if you like Rock Band and AC/DC, you should get AC/DC Rock Band!” It’s just that the game part of this game is pointless. Putting these songs on your hard drive will make your Rock Band 2 experience infinitely more enjoyable and Australian. It’s just that I wish I could’ve just downloaded this pack off the internet instead of having to spend a bit more money and time going to a store and buying a physical copy of a game I’m never going to play again. The DVD and case that hold this game feel like a waste of natural resources.

3 ½ stars

Which is apparently AC/DC’s fault too, on insisting that their content be released in an album-like form instead of on the internet as individual songs.