Remember how I keep bitching about the Guitar Hero series and the fact that there’s a new game every month or two, and it’s almost identical to the last one? Yeah, you should have worked out by now that I’m quite firmly in the Rock Band camp. Even their band specific games have higher production values than the Guitar Hero equivalent (GH: Van Halen, for example, was a carbon copy of GH4, which was stupidly disappointing). Wait, what’s this? Green Day: Rock Band? Around a year after Beatles: Rock Band? …It’s going to be a long night.

Ever since this game was announced, I just knew that we could be sure of two things. Firstly, it was going to lack some of the graphical originality seen from The Beatles, and instead purely focus on watching a band play on stage. Secondly, there was going to be a very small selection of music from their early days (or, what I like to call, any of the good Green Day albums). And, sadly, it seems I was right on both counts.

Telling you about the gameplay in a Rock Band game is a lot like telling you this analogy was going somewhere good; it’s a giant waste of time. Still, for the uninitiated, coloured blocks fly towards you on the screen and you strum/hit the right button to score mad stacks of points. Or, if you’re singing, you sing the right note as it passes a bar. It’s that simple. The gameplay has not changed in the slightest. And why should it? It’s perfectly functional, and bound to sell games.

Graphically, bizarrely, the game seems a bit… lacking somehow. The cartoony style sort of worked for showing off the Beatles, who always were a bit weird, so it all kind of fit in nicely. With Green Day, they’ve tried to make the game a bit grittier and dirty, fitting in with the punk music being played. The problem is, it just doesn’t quite add up. Early Green Day band members just look like they belong in Madam Tussaud’s wax museum, they’re that horrible and plastic. More recent styling is a lot more normal, but then you might as well just be playing one of the other Rock Band games. The representations of the band members are actually pretty spot on, although there were a couple of times where Billie Joe looked like Paul McCartney, though that could just be a real life problem.

And now onto the sound, the real meat and bones of the piece. You’re gonna have to be a real fan of Green Day to pick this game up, and even if you are, you’re going to have to love all of the different phases they’ve gone through in their career. The tracklist, in my opinion, is really not worth it. For old school fans, you get the entire Dookie album, followed by two or three songs from each album afterwards. For newbie fans, you get the whole of American Idiot, as well as a couple more from 21st Century Breakdown, along with extra DLC in the form of most of the rest of 21st Century Breakdown. It’s pretty clear that if you don’t like the new stuff, you’re not going to like this game. Add in to that the American Idiot-era centric sound effects, from radio crackle as you shift screens, explosions and bullets when you gain stars, and a quiet bomb exploding should you miss a note, and you find yourself very much in the anti-government world. Still, if you love Dookie, then you can always play that album over and over again, right?

Obviously you’re not going to please everyone with a music game, or any game in fact. But Green Day just doesn’t really seem quite the best band to sign up for a one-band game. At the end of the day, most of their songs are basically the same, what with them being punks and everything, although you could argue the same about many other bands. They just don’t seem like they should be held up in the same regard as The Beatles. Next time Harmonix, get a band who really are legends. Queens of the Stone Age maybe.

Green Day: Rock Band comes out June 8th, if you’re interested.

Agree? Disagree? Just don’t want to feel lonely in the big scary world? Leave a comment!