Of the three new games put in fortnite in the last week or so, Festival is by far the most fitting. Lego Fort feels a bit tacked on and barely keeps touch with the main platform, and Rocket Racing feels like a minigame for Rocket League that for some reason, is found in fortnite, but Festival actually kinda makes sense. It's actually shares the styling of fortnite for one thing, but is also a pretty reasonable extension of the relationship the main game has had with celebrity and music for the past near-decade now. Add on top fortnite's very obvious avenues for the monetisation and licensing of everything involved with a rhythm game and it really feels like this should really work. It's so easy to visualise the way it should be - get the Weeknd skin and it comes with a Weeknd emote and a few tracks to use in what is basically rock band 5, the new live service music game that could ride on for god knows how long.

Well, first problem with that is Harmonix have presumably lost all the staff that knew how to make rock band, because festival is just fundementally terrible, keeping the worst aspects of rock band (multiplier scoring, uninteresting charting, difficulty coming from endurance and repetitive notes, note accuracy not mattering), but worse.

Main issue is really the charting. It is, for one, shockingly easy, with even the very hardest currently available chart (Kendrick Lamar's I on expert, vocals), being barely a mid-level Rock Band chart in terms of diffculty, and games like even the relatively casual DJMAX wouldn't rate it about the bottom half of its difficulty scale. Realistically, that alone is enough for the game to really fall apart for even new rhythm gamers quickly as there is next to no challenge, but the woes go further than that. In an adapatation to making this work on controller face buttons, the chart is now secretly split into two, a bit like djmax, and opposite holds arent allowed (i.e you cant hold the middle and fifth button on expert because they would be the Square and Circle PS5 Buttons simultaneously). Whilst this isnt a distaster on it's own, combined with the already weak charting of Harmonix and you end up with some extremely unengaging rhythm gameplay. It's repetitive and boring.

The song choices are just shit too. The licensors might have truly pulled all the big guns, but protip, Seven Nation Army, a song that repeats the same 3 second riff for 4 minutes, is not a good track for a rhythm game. A whole bunch of tracks will have 30 second plus sections where you just wait and emote, i guess? Don't put that in your rhythm game!

This last thing probably is a result of, for some reason, still sticking to the old guitar-drums-voacls-bass set up for song charts despite that no longer being neeccessary, and them all fundementaly playing identically due to the loss of peripherals and lack of imagination.

The nail in the coffin is really the monetisation, which is really poor. I know music licensing is silly and that rhythm games often come with a tax, but a super limited rotation of free songs, an awful battlepass that's twice the price as the BRs, and $4 a pop if you want to keep a song with no other frills attached is twice as bad as rock band's traditional pricing, which itself was pushing it. And when that's put side by side with content for the real game at a more reasonable price, it sticks out even worse.

I don't want to even bother talking about the Jam Stage feature, one of the most worthless game features ive ever seen, which lets you mix some samples with friends. It's remarkably limited, doesnt sound good, and you get a whole two tracks to sample from. It's embarassing.

The other two additions to Fortnite this month, rocket racing and lego fortnite, are also bad - Rocket Racing is kinda boring and Lego is cursed by being a survival crafting multiplayer game, basically delivering it straight to the pit of medicority, but Festival is the biggest stinker, and a huge waste of potential. Given time and a lot of work and deep discounts, epic can probably force it to be a long term thing - but the start here is the worst game i've played from Harmonix and you have to wonder whether they will just dump this and go all in on the lego.

Idk why I was so excited for this mode when for most of my life every single time I play a rhythm game I just become that one Spongebob image of Mr Krabs playing golf and then remembering "Wait a minute........I hate golf"

So far the song list is pretty decent and overall it's just an alright version of Rock Band which is cool for those who like stuff like Rock Band and Guitar Hero I just never got into them, but I really don't like how overly monetized this mode feels. I know that's a weird statment since this is Fortnite after all but I really don't like how much a lot of the skins for your instruments cost and the price for the songs in the shop are way too much for what your getting.
It's not as bad as the racing mode asking 37 dollars for a fucking car but for what your getting and the price of the songs and the skins and even the stand along battle pass for this mode is twice the amount the normal battle pass cost.
This mode along with the racing mode feels like Epic is testing the waters on how much they think they can get away with nickel and diming their players before they start realizing their getting ripped off and stop buying them. This will never happen since people who play Fortnite are children and autistic adults with no sense of saving or having a budget............𝘗𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘮𝘦...............:(

I'm honestly kind of surprised by how much pure vitriol this seems to be getting from folks on here compared to the far cry excitement I've seen from the Clone Hero community folks? Festival still has a long ways to go in terms of features, songs and especially visual polish, but the key thing that makes me enjoy it as much as I have so far is that it fits a somewhat unfulfilled niche of a casual and accessible rhythm game. I love rhythm games! I play way too much Project Diva to be considered healthy! I've definitely been getting more into DJMax Respect V ever since I caught it on a sale! All of those games are great, but they're great for someone like me who has spent likely hundreds to thousands of hours getting used to the harsh difficulty and learning curve of those games, and also likely more importantly I like the more foreign niche appeal of their set lists.

In terms of more current modern pop and rock songs, Guitar Hero/Rock Band leaving the rhythm game space as well as stuff like Just Dance becoming less popular have left a void in that space of music that I've had a good time with seeing again here with Festival. I do wish their launch picks were a bit more interesting, but like, I'm not going to deny that I've probably played the one Olivia Rodrigo song more times than I should be and that's reminiscent of the power older GH/RB games had for me. Discovering new current songs is entertaining and fun, and I don't need ridiculously insanely tough high-accuracy focused gameplay to completely seal the deal here. I don't really get why some are so shocked by the multiplier score-focused gameplay when that's always been how Guitar Hero and Rock Band has worked? Just don't miss?

The real issues for me at the moment is the sheer lack of visual variety compared to those predecessors and the pricing model. The notes desperately need to be color coded like those games because when some of the more overcharted songs come along, they're needlessly harder to read than they really need to be. The dances and motions the band have when playing songs also gets old fast, and that feeling of that high intensity concert energy being missing was only further emphasized for me when I recently tried out modding World Tour again and seeing just how wild the animations were for your characters. I miss having the audience chanting along with the music when you kept a high streak going, having the lead and vocals singing together every now and then, the close-ups of the guitar, the extra visual effects and filters for certain song segments; I could go on and on but this is one area that I really hope gets improved sooner than later. Seeing that stupid animation of the vocalist sliding back and forth playing three to four times in a row might actually drive me insane.

The pricing model is really the bigger deeper core issue here that I think only time is going to reveal the effects of however. Rhythm games have always had a difficult tug and pull balance regarding how do you reasonably price out extra songs for DLC, and Rock Band was always up there with being some of the worst in my mind because of the insistence toward individual songs at a high price rather than song packs which more recent rhythm games have pushed towards. Festival pushes the line way too far however with songs now costing $5 dollars each with the only extra benefits to supposedly justify it being you can use them as emotes in Battle Royale and the weird half-baked Jam Stage mode. Absolute utter snore. The Festival Pass also being separate from the already paid Battle Pass that the rest of the game uses is also really out there and priced far too high for what it offers, alongside the grind itself feeling like a slog. The whole model mostly concerns me at the moment because I get the worried feeling that this isn't going to meet Epic's sales expectations the way they hope it will, and I'm not excited for whatever possible "solutions" they might try to come up with as time goes on.

As it stands right now though? I still think this is a very fun mode that's genuinely been getting me to load up the game on a somewhat daily basis just to play a few songs, either on my own or with friends and trying to beat out our scores on the leaderboards, and while I love those harsher more difficult other rhythm games like DJMax, they don't compete in the accessibility and easy appeal factor like this does and that's a feeling I've missed for a while now. Hearing that Harmonix somehow convinced Epic and PDP to create a new guitar controller coming out very soon along with full instrument controller support might actually make me bust.

I wanted to write a review on why I think this is one of the poorest commercial rhythm games I played but Cold nailed literally every point I wanted to hit so I'd rather just remind people of GHWT Definitive Edition if you're really looking to gangnam style in backrooms with Doomguy on vocals and Peter Griffin on drums.

yeah, its pretty kinda nothing right now, but im really hopeful for the future of this mode if they keep supporting it, having primarily controller support concerns really hinders the beatmaps, but the pull up notes are neat and adds a little to what the two sided beatmap style lacks, pretty easy to anyone familiar to rhythm games, but needs to be accessible to newcomers and fortnite's sperm aged user base, dont understand pricing discontentment when its about $5, same as rockband before, and you get 4 different beatmaps, but yeah as the songlist grows and stuff gets more complex in a couple years this'll be clean, i mean, we have announced instruments

minigame is kind of boring but i love the weeknd. Come on everyone sing along with me! "they say my brain meltin and the only thing i tell em is i live for the future and the present dont exist so baby take your clothes off, a chance like this you may never get to show off, show off, show off what you talkin bout... less you like to tease baby. In reality you dont know how to please, baby. Blue ball queen, take your f#*@in' seat, baby Ride it out, now I know you wanna scream, baaaaaaby, " - the weeknd