Right, so, let’s get this one out of the way here: Rock Band is mighty pricey. It’s something that is about as obvious as opening your fridge to discover an alligator lying in your humus, and obviously any review needs to take into account that buying the full pack of instruments and the game is going to cost somewhere around £140. Given that the majority of us have already spent the best part of £70 on a Guitar Hero title at some point in the last year or so, can EA and Harmonix’s - developer of Guitar Hero 1 and 2 - latest strum, bash and wail-‘em-up really justify the cost?

To anyone who hasn’t played it – this includes the version of me that existed last week – the answer is probably no. To anyone who gets their hands on a copy and sits down and jams away with a group of friends, it suddenly begins to make a great deal of sense. The whole way Rock Band slots together not only creates a fantastic party title that you’ll keep bringing out again and again on the evenings you’re not slumped against a pub pool table, but it also improves on the Guitar Hero formula in pretty much every area in both single and multiplayer modes, giving the whole thing a surprising amount of depth.

Of course, this is the first home console title to offer players the chance to put together a four piece musical band comprising of different instruments. The guitars form an integral part of this obviously; lead and bass roles are offered, and even better is that Harmonix have opened the 360 version up to work perfectly with the Guitar Hero 2 and 3 controllers should you have them lying about. This time, though, people with a lot of pent up frustration can take our their rage with a drum kit and those who think they can sing in tune (note – not me, at all, ever) can scream along to their favourite songs whilst everyone else does the real work. Fun times indeed!

Those used to a bit of the ol’ strum strum from Guitar Hero will feel right at home with the way Rock Band works the axes. Little coloured rectangles float down from the top of the screen on a virtual fret board, and as they pass a strum bar at the bottom of the screen the player has to bang out the appropriate note by pressing the corresponding button and flicking the strum bar. As progression is made more complicated note charts start burning themselves into your brain and your hands are made to work ever harder in the quest for perfection, and overall the whole thing is still as maddeningly addictive as it always has been.

There are, of course, slight differences in the way that Rock Band works. Whenever you come across a solo in the middle of a song a little blue haze falls across the fret board and a percentage score pops up, with a higher amount giving you a little bonus score upon completion. With the proper Rock Band guitar you are also offered a new set of fret buttons higher along the neck with which to widdle out the noodly stuff, but obviously this is more aesthetic than anything. Overdrive, which is basically your boost juice, works pretty much similarly to GH’s Star Power in the way that you get glowing note runs that, when hit perfectly, add to a power bar that you can activate by tilting the guitar neck to give you a MEGA SCORE BOOSTING BOOST OF GLORY, but rather thankfully these note runs differentiate from the ones in Guitar Hero 3 by being on sensible, achievable sections of song rather than being maliciously placed on ridiculously hard sections in some sort of attempt to make you want to smash your plastic guitar through your television screen and run off screaming.

It’s when it comes to the drumming that things get a little more different, and it’s likely that most people receiving their chunky instrument pack boxes will probably turn to a bit of stick smacking first to see what it feels like. If you’re anything like me and haven’t ever sat behind a proper set, chances are that your first few jaunts will prove somewhat haphazard and full of misplaced beats and clangs, and it’s fair to say that most will come out the other end with a new appreciation of what messrs Peart, Ulrich and Smith go through every time they wield the sticks. Whereas the guitar bit of rock games have always mixed guitar and keyboard skills with the whole button-pressing thing, the drumming actually feels a lot more closer to what you’d expect minus a bit of the arm-crossing and long arm stretching.

Split into four pads and with a foot pedal for the kick drum, the drums work in a similar manner to the guitar in the way that little note bars scroll from the top of the screen and pass through a beat bar, at which point you must hit whatever is displayed. Rather than having five channels for the notes to appear, you are given one for each one of the pads and an orange line that goes across the chart for when you need to give a bit of the boot to proceedings, and it’s getting used to using the kick drum that actually ends up taking the most time. Early loops and beats tend to focus more on repetition and steady, manageable use of the pads, but as you begin to delve into the more difficult songs (Metallica – Enter Sandman being a primary git) you’ll start having to add beats in strange places and swap between two pads almost at once, which is all rather challenging.

It’s mostly satisfying, though there are a couple of caveats. The first is that the drums are a little awkward if you have longer arms, with the pad placement making it a bit easy to catch the plastic rim when you are reaching across for the lower green pad. It’s something you learn to deal with, sure, but it does feel a little cramped at times and it does frustrate immensely when you go for a green note and catch plastic instead. The problem is amplified by the significance that the green pad has in activating the drum version of Overdrive, for which you build up the power by hitting glowing notes but then have to do a drum roll that ends in a green pad cymbal smash to kick things off. The amount of times I did an epic little roll only to mess up and catch the corner of the green pad when I desperately needed a bit of boost was rather depressing.

The other issue is one that is possibly again due to learning a new trade, but one that does still frustrate. At times it seems as if the pads on the drums don’t register what seemed like a perfect hit. Whereas the guitar part of things feels relatively tight and responsive, drumming occasionally feels a little woolly and random and the experience is hampered a little because of it. It’s not a game-breaking issue; good drummers can still reel off the beats and score very high percentages in songs, and the learning curve – although difficult – is just about right, but it does feel somewhat of an inexact science at times.

Rounding off the trio of noise-making is the microphone, which if my experience is anything to go by is the bit of kit that’ll get passed around like a hot potato until some poor sod has no other option other than to sing. Lyrics scroll across the top of the screen and whoever is yelping along needs to match the pitch of the original singer as closely as possible in order to rack up the points, although in some sections where the words slow down the game judges you on how accurately you seem to be saying whatever is appearing on screen. It’s probably the one faucet of Rock Band that won’t be used as much as the others, but for those extroverts out there it’s nice to have a channel from which they can vent.

It’s fair to say, then, that the nuts and bolts of Rock Band are pretty solid. Playing the instruments themselves is great fun, and in particular the Fender-inspired guitar, with the buttons sunken into the fret board and a smoother, less clicky strum bar is a significant step up in quality from peripherals past. Luckily, the increase in quality also passes from the plastic to the code too, with Harmonix packing the actual game with plenty of fantastic tunes, involving modes and great online functionality for players to bop through. They’ve also gone and packed in the one feature all frustrated players worldwide were gagging for – the option on selected songs to finish with a complete mash of guitar strums and massive drum beats for a big, score-boosting rock finish. Whoever thought of this, I love you. A lot.

Initially, things won’t seem all that different to Guitar Hero games previous. Solo tour modes enable you to select an instrument, create a character and go through a list of tunes that increase in complexity as you progress, with the same four difficulty settings – Easy, Medium, Hard and Expert – as the aforementioned series. A general perception from myself is that the difficulty level of Rock Band has been toned down a lot from Neversoft’s first Guitar Hero effort (Dragonforce on Expert is utterly silly), but at the same time the expert difficulty level will offer a challenge to experienced noodlers and talented drummers all the same.

It’s when you start pairing up with a few buddies that the game’s differences being to make themselves clear, and where Rock Band really comes into its own. Once again you are allowed to create a character from a number of preset male and female parts (a nice touch, offering a bit of individuality to proceedings) and group together to travel a virtual world on the trail of fame and fortune. Starting off with a few easy tunes and a selection of small venues dotted around Europe, you progress through by playing tunes and earning stars, points and fans to unlock further arenas and tunes.

It progresses from here beautifully, and given how fun it is to play with a bandmate anyway it was always going to be superbly fun to keep ticking off the songs and venues from your world map. Whether it’s picking off the single song challenges or the multi-song sets (some lasting over half-an-hour), everyone will cheer when their favourite tunes turn up and moan when they have to play that bloody Who song again, making it a great way to spend a few hours in.

Talking of ‘that bloody Who song’, the music selection is wide-ranging and varied, and in this reviewer’s personal opinion another step above recent Guitar Hero offerings. Contemporary British bands such as Oasis and Radiohead bow their heads, whilst Devon nutters Muse are featured all-too-briefly amongst other tunes by Metallica, Blue Oyster Cult, The Police, Queens of the Stone Age and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. A pleasing thing for me was that it was songs that I didn’t know – the Coheed and Cambrias of this world, for example – that proved to be the most satisfying to riff through, leading to plenty of pleasant surprises throughout the list. There are a few not-so-good ones of course: Blur’s Beetlebum is as boring as watching ink dry, for example. Still, it’s much more hit than miss.

Better still is the online functionality, which not only offers the chance to hook up with some online rockers to form a mighty band across some lag-free, silky smooth online rocking, but also offers high score charts and what seems at the moment to be a much more regular, comprehensive song shop to buy additional content from. The songs aren’t exactly cheap, falling at 160 Microsoft Points (about 90p a song), but the chance to snap up tunes such as T. Rex’s Get It On and Nine Inch Nails’ March of the Pigs are too good to miss out on. Harmonix are also promising to listen to fans and update the store with tunes that are demanded by the popular majority, and with full albums on the shopping list too we can only hope that they HURRY UP AND GIVE US ALL THE MUSE ALBUMS EVER TO DOWNLOAD RIGHT NOW PLEASE. Oh, and some Queen would be lovely, thanks :-).

Then there’re all the little things that Rock Band does right, such as giving us a couple of battle modes so that we can play bits of songs against our friends to try and out-score them, or having some lovely visual effects during the gigs and – should you be playing well enough – having the crowd sing along to the song you are playing. There’s the way you can easily switch between difficulty levels between different gigs so that everyone can play together to their own separate standards, and the little awards each player is given at the end, such as highest streak, most energetic and top performer. It’s packed full of lovely little touches that all go to adding to the overall experience, making it feel ever more worthy of the rather steep asking price.

Oops, off I go again with the price thing. See, it probably isn’t going to go away and at the end of the day £140 is a month’s supply of lager/pies/sherbet saucers, but even the most cynical, most hard-nosed gamer can’t help but have their rage at the asking fee muted ever-so-slightly by just how much damned fun you have with the thing. As something to assemble when a party is happening or a game to work through solo or with a buddy, Rock Band ticks so many boxes that it’s hard not to want to buy it, even if the accountant in your head is frowning and saying no. Worth eating less, drinking less and going without new toys for a whole month? Most certainly.