It's a neat little mode, the songs are good. It's polished, but the songs and especially instruments are extremely overpriced. Not to mention the event more expensive battle pass for the mode. Which is a far too big grind.

These things are the main reason this isn't rated higher. It's a fun rhythm game. But the absolutely terrible monetization is a huge factor in my rating. You can buy the songs on iTunes for a quarter of the price they are in this game, and you'll be able to listen to them at any moment instead of only when playing Fortnite.

The Rock Band nostalgia is real.
This game is super fun to mess around with. First there's the main rhythm game mode where you can see your ridiculous Fortnite skins jamming out to some banger songs, complete with different instrument options and really fun charts.
Then there's the playground aspect, being able to use any songs you've bought (or the Epic songs in rotation) however you like. Mess with the tempo, change the instrument you're using, mix and match with other songs that other players own. Go nuts!
Is it a super in-depth or complex game? No, but it's perfectly enjoyable multiplayer fun, and as a rhythm game enjoyer I'm glad this is here to stay.

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.

It can be funny to hit the griddy while Peter Griffin sings Bad Romance but when you have to pay $5 per song if you want to play ones outside of the daily rotation it's a bit ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that the charting feels pretty wacky and spammy with some insturments. To be clear I've never played Guitar Hero, but based on what I've seen of it the charting does feel like it'd work better on a guitar controller rather than an actual controller. When there's no way to officially link up a guitar controller and the main draw of this game like the rest of Fortnite is that it's completely free to enjoy, it kinda sucks.

Jam Stage is also just...baffling. They basically made Fuser but you walk around on a hub-area map that looks like it was made in Creative and each person can contribute their own track of audio. But...you still have to pay $5 per song? So what's even the point, besides grinding out playtime XP or the quests that expect you to play on the Jam Stage for 30 minutes daily? There's no way Epic doesn't know everyone will just load it up and then go AFK until they hit the daily XP limit from it.

But in all honestly, it isn't entirely bad, and despite its flaws I do appreciate the effort to try and make a sort of gateway rhythm game that tries to maintain the mass appeal Fortnite had but in a different format entirely. The song choices definitely are an example of that. If this gets more people into rhythm games, I won't complain - although I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them better ones myself.

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...............:(

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.