The fastest way to learn guitar is now better than ever. Join over three million people who have learned to play guitar with the award-winning Rocksmith® method. Plug any real guitar or bass with a 1/4 inch jack directly into your PC or Mac and you’ll learn to play in just 60 days.
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Things I Like So Far:
- The game has a wide selection of songs; this includes tunes from the last 50+ years.
- I like that the game makes suggestions about how to learn a given song, giving the user a path to mastery. This includes everything from playing the song to set the difficulty to providing chord charts relevant to the song.
- Nit-Pick: I wish the chord charts were more interactive than a picture. It would have been nice if they reacted dynamically to being played (and being played correctly) like they do during normal game-play.
- The game offers more than just tabs (a la GuitarPro). Among other things, it can react to your playing and adjust the difficulty accordingly.
- It also offers a "riff repeater," that allows the user to isolate certain sections of a song over and over until they are mastered. In my mind, this is one of the most important features of the game, as it allows songs to be "worked up," in a manner similar to how I would learn them without Rocksmith.
- You can learn to play bass, too. I really appreciate that both are included, as I could have totally seen a different publisher releasing that as a different game (and still asking full price).
- I like that there are many way to learn from Rocksmith, including lesson videos, "games," that help the user guitar-related skills (e.g. string skipping, fret locations, etc), and of course, the songs themselves.
Things I Like Less:
- DLC songs are $3 a pop when they are not on sale.
- It's not that the price is unfair, given the cost of licensing, transcribing, and programming any given track, but it also means the end user could easily pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to get all the songs they want.
- The "dynamic leveling," (aka dynamic difficulty) mentioned above can be hit-or-miss.
- While it is nice to be able to play bits and pieces of even the most difficult songs, I wasn't always able to hear the song in what I was playing. This was especially true when the given part was really cut down compared to the, "full version." Dynamic difficulty also sometimes made it difficult to know when to play, especially when the, "full version" of the song (with more notes) was chugging along in the background.
- There are certain features of Rocksmith that are oddly difficult to access.
- Two examples that come to mind are: 1) adding fretboard markers to the on-screen UI while playing songs, and 2) creating playlists of songs (beyond just adding a given song to your "favorites").
- The game is not without technical issues, even 5 years later.
- First, some of the DLC songs didn't work when they were released to the general public. I haven't encountered any "unusable DLC," but apparently that was a problem when the game was younger.
- Second, the game sometimes slows down (with glitched / "bit-crushed" audio to boot) if certain audio outputs are used. I had no problem playing on headphones, but this would happen within minutes when I played the game using speakers.
- The game is far from a complete, "perfect," learning tool. In particular, I found it was sometimes much too forgiving with my timing while playing. It also sometimes gave me credit for notes I clearly missed, but was "miming," on the guitar as I was flailing to keep up with a song.
- Granted, I can't lay both of these problems solely at Rocksmith's feet; it is also my job as a player / musician to try and address these issues.
Will I Keep Playing?
Given that I spent a bunch of money on DLC during the 2019 Steam winter sale, yes. Despite some of the issues listed above, I still think the game is worth playing. I don't think it will ever replace in-person lessons, but if nothing else, it keeps me playing the instrument.
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