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.