Rock Band 4‘s big December update drops tomorrow, continuing the game’s slow march from bare bones to full-featured band game. Among this month’s additions are score challenge features, full-combo recognition and a nightmare called “Brutal Mode”.
Brutal Mode is for advanced players who hate having fun, or at least have a warped sense of it. As one to four players progress through a song the mode monitors their performance, upping the difficulty the better they do. Notes begin to fade out, accuracy is judged more harshly — it’s insanity, basically.
While advanced players enjoy being brutalised, perhaps partaking in the new Variable Breakneck Speed feature that allows them to modify a song’s velocity up to 2.5 times, I’ll be enjoying the new score challenge features, which keep track of my stats and let me compare them to my friends online. There’s a new activity feed, and you can use it to taunt your friends with your scores, which is always lovely. And isn’t it about time Rock Band kept track of perfect combo progress?
Check out the full list of December updates over at the official website. I see they are improving microphone lag. It might be time for another singing video.
Comments
4 responses to “Rock Band 4 Adds Terrifying New ‘Brutal’ Mode”
That does not look like fun what so ever
It’s Rocksmith. That’s what rocksmith does. Once you clock up a certain amoutn of points on a track, it enters ‘master’ mode where notes begin to fade out to force you to play the song without the tablature.
Yeah, but it’s a lot easier to play a real guitar from memory than try to memorise Rock Band note tracks that don’t have a one-to-one matching with the notes in the song.
Guitar Hero had (and still has?) the Performance Mode “cheat”, that removes the fretboard and all the notes, and there are plenty of videos around of people using that and doing well.
I don’t think it’s that different from memorising a song on a real guitar.