Fortnite Festival added support for rock band controllers!! I love my new Riffmaster. It's a really solid controller that I can't wait to play Clone Hero and YARG with instead of Fortnite Festival.

Instrument support in Festival is a hot mess at the time of writing. Navigating menus is a pain in the ass on the guitar controller. I'm not sure if this is a specific Riffmaster issue but tilting the guitar to activate overdrive sometimes just straight up does not work. Only the Riffmaster or expensive used Rock Band 4 controllers are currently available to use for the Pro instrument modes as of now, with keybinding support coming at a later time. The vast majority of the Pro charts have been improved from their normal charts (Sandstorm and i were two favorites of mine) but some songs - particularly keys only charts - just aren't as fun on a guitar controller instead of the keyboard (Boy's A Liar). I noticed Everlong got a bit neutered too in the translation from RB2 to Festival.

We're now in Season 3 and the song list has grown pretty significantly. Quality is still all over the place, with a couple new surprise bangers (Ella Baila Sola) with fun charts... but the majority being kind of dull TikTok songs or ports from older Rock Band games. This season is Billie Eilish themed - I'm neutral on her music but a lot of it just is not that exciting to play in a rhythm game.

It's kind of obvious at this point that Harmonix has struggled to adapt their game to the live service model, and I feel for the developers trying to deal with all the quirks of Fortnite's frequent updates, UE5 issues and pushing out between 5 and 9 new songs per week. Issues that Festival has had since the beginning have still not been ironed out, for example:

No way to easily restart a song
Song list UI is still pretty terrible
Cannot view leaderboards for songs not in the rotation
Goofy canned animations
Glitchy stage visuals
No way to deal with people afking in multiplayer
Still no practice mode
Wonky lift notes and overdrive detection

The core 5 key Harmonix rhythm gameplay is still fun and I like to see Kratos singing my favorite songs so I still play, but it's obvious at this point the future of plastic guitar games is community built stuff like Clone Hero. I understand they're still ironing the kinks out of the live service rhythm game niche they're trapped under, but as someone who has put thousands of hours into Rock Band games, it's hard not to be disappointed with Fortnite Festival.

I think Nour is a really cool idea and I did enjoy playing it but I wish there was more to it. It is pure sandbox with the only goals being in the form of PS5 trophies - you get a handful of tools and spells to play with in a bunch of different food settings with the ability to spawn in more food or sometimes interact with appliances in the environment but that's it. Controls are confusing and the mechanic with the jellyfish and the rhythm tapping stuff I didn't really understand. Some of the food levels are more fun than others like the microwave and burger tower but others I quit after about 30 seconds. Was extremely disappointed that the PS5 version barely used any controller haptics as this would have been the perfect game for it. Visual style and graphics were extremely on point though.

I'm still playing fortnite festival even though it's still kind of bad (I even finished the festival pass - which was made a lot less monotonous this time around). Harmonix has started implementing a few much needed gameplay updates such as fixes to Overdrive activation killing streaks and some updates to charts, but the core gameplay still feels half-baked. Lift notes continue to be the bane of my existence, multiplayer still feels disjointed and for every visual glitch or performance issue that is patched, another one quickly appears to take its place.

Harmonix has been on a groove with song releases at least, with 6-8 being added to the game per week. As always, songs are a mixed bag of bangers that play well, bangers with extremely boring charts, and tiktok songs that are neither fun to listen to nor play in a rhythm game. Some of the highlights:

- All the green day songs have super fun charts on pretty much everything
- "Hold Me Closer" by Britney Spears and Elton John being a surprise banger and having a really fun lead chart
- Songs like "Barbie Girl" and "What Is Love" I wish we got as Rock Band DLC (where they belong with actual vocals tbh!)
- Many many new lady gaga songs that have surprisingly fun charts except for "Bloody Mary" which they only added because a nightcore version of it went viral on tiktok recently
- "Ride with Me" by Nelly.. totally out of left field choice but I fucking love that song even if its not the most fun to play in a rhythm game lmao

At the end of the day, festival is a fun little diversion and tbf I wasn't expecting every major issue to get fixed for season 2 but it still needs a lot of development love. Real instrument support is coming whenever PDP can get their new guitar controllers (!!!) in stores so hopefully that'll be the kick in the pants this game desperately needs, at least for now.