Rock Band 3 Critic Reviews

Video games -- not just rhythm games, but all video games -- rarely show this much ambition. Even more rare are occasions where developers manage to fulfill the impossibly lofty goals they set before themselves. Rock Band 3 manages both with ease, backing up brilliant ideas with flawless execution.

The best music game ever. Harmonix have outdone themselves with new instruments and an insane Pro Mode that will keep us playing for months, perhaps even years to come.

I'm not sure where else there is to go, but I don't really care. I'm having too much fun right now.

The bar for music games has been irrefutably raised. Like magic, gamers can now be transformed into musicians... provided they don't run screaming for the hills at the first sight of a barre chord.

Truthfully, the entire game feels like a defiantly kickass celebration of music. Combined with the complete success and undeniable innovation of Pro Mode, how could anyone resist Rock Band 3?

Rock Band 3 is simply perfect. It's the final evolution of the music games, the perfect harmony between game and study, the perfect party experience and an awesome game. Everything is packed with love and attention, from the smaller thing to major features. If you love music and videogames, buy it and love it.

Rock Band 3 is a knockout in just about every way it can be. If you enjoyed anything from Harmonix in the past, you owe it to yourself to rush out and buy this.

Breathtaking in ambition and crafted with the skill of a studio that's been making music games for 15 years, Rock Band 3 is Harmonix's masterpiece – a towering achievement not just for the genre, but for the medium itself.

Still nobody does this better than Harmonix, and with Rock Band 3 they are at the top of their game.

Rock Band 3 is a complete package and quite possibly the definitive music game. Once again, Harmonix defines and sets the bar for what the music genre can achieve. It will be hard pressed for anyone, Harmonix included, to top this game.

It all adds up to what is easily the best and most progressive rhythm-action game ever made, if that label even applies anymore.

If your bank account can withstand the investment for those pro instruments, or even if you want to keep playing the old way, Rock Band 3 is now the new benchmark of music games for groups. The Keyboard is a true bonus, especially in pro mode, and the Pro Guitar a real challenge for die hard gamers. Still blessed with its spot-on gameplay, as a videogame, it is beyond reproach and will entertain you for hours. But in terms of music teaching tool, we're not quite there yet. Only time will tell if the public will follow, and if the pro mode will indeed lead to new vocations, like the drums addition in the original Rock Band did. But Harmonix made progress and invested in innovation, while its competitors laze, and one may only applaud for that.

The game's tutorial is excellent, and it slowly introduces you to some otherwise difficult concepts, but unless you have a lot of chords under your fingers beforehand, it takes actual practice to play on Pro Guitar.

Rock Band 3 continues to delight my gaming senses and eardrums, and I look forward in watching my wallet deplete of funds with new DLC songs and instrument options on down the line.

A superbly engineered game that is both the most ambitious and the best the genre has to offer.

I don't know how this game will do in the sales charts, but personally it's turned me from a music-game-weary cynic into a fresh-faced jammer once again. I'm not sure how long that will last, but for now I'm loving it.

Overall, Rock Band 3 does a great job of refining the music game experience while at the same time pushing it forward by blurring the line between playing a music game and actually playing music.

It's not only an achievement within it's own genre, but a landmark for the entire medium as well.

About as close to perfect as you're going to get.

Everything you ever wanted from a music title, and so much more besides. It doesn't matter how you want to play Rock Band 3, just know that you really do need to play it.