Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'll preface this by saying I am a HUGE Rock Band fan. It is one of my favorite activities ever! I've bought literally hundreds of songs. So the prospect of a new Rock Band on this generation of system was obviously extremely exciting. Normally I would have pre-ordered this game, but I was kind of holding out hope that a friend would get it for me for my birthday because it was around the same time as the game was released. Unfortunately that didn't happen, so about a week and a half later I went on Amazon to buy it. I couldn't help but notice multiple negative reviews for the game and was pretty surprised. How could anyone not love a Rock band game? What could possibly be wrong with it?? I read them all, but didn't think about them much and played the game with a clean slate. Every issue that I read everyone report on this game, I found to be accurate. Here were my main problems: -This has been discussed a lot, but if you have bought download songs (like most people who have ever played Rock Band have), you will have to go one by one and re-download them all individually, a process that took me several hours. That's fine, still worth it. However even then, the system does not seem to be functioning properly. Most of the songs that I had already bought show as "PURCHASED", however some of them didn't, and I had to click on the song as if I was going to buy it and then it would give me an "install" option. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but when you've downloaded hundreds of songs, you don't inherently have that library in your head, so I had to click on almost every song available to see if I had purchased it. Even worse, is that the system did not recognize songs that I DID buy, and actually wanted me to buy them again. I own every Doors song that has been released. However, for some reason, it is not recognizing that I have purchased ANY Doors song, and it wants me to buy them all again. Same with some No Doubt songs, and other songs I have already purchased. So I have not been able to play music that I have purchased, and is available, for reasons unknown to me. Additionally, not all DLC songs have been transferred over to this game, and it is missing a LOT of songs. There are SOME White Stripes songs, but not all of them. Same with The Shins, and many other songs that are no longer available with no explanation. What happened to the other 100+ songs that I bought, and I don't mean the on-disc songs from Rock Bands 1-3 + Lego/Beatles Rock Band (which inexplicably won't be available until the holidays, if at all). I am playing with about 1/4 of the song library that I would otherwise have if I were playing Rock Band 3 on my Xbox 360. So why even bother playing this one? Just the fact that it wants me to re-buy songs I've already bought is extremely frustrating. -There is a troubling issue with vocal lag that I've never experienced in any other Rock Band game which a large number of other players have confirmed as well. Our system was perfectly calibrated for the other instruments (we used the game's built-in auto calibration). One of my friends was so bothered by it she didn't even want to sing anymore. -I bought the version with the legacy adapter so I could play with my existing Rock Band equipment. Unfortunately it seems to pick and choose which equipment it wants to work with (specifically ONLY wireless instruments apparently, although NOT wireless mics?). My Beatles guitar and drums work fine, however I went out and bought a wired Rock Band 2 guitar (licensed, came with the original game) to complete my set, but this guitar does not work with Rock Band 4. Wish I had known that, waste of $40. -When you drop out an instrument, it also seems to drop out the sound that instrument makes from the song track. We were playing random set-lists, and got to a song none of us wanted to sing, so we merely dropped the mic 'player' out. Well, then when playing the song, we couldn't hear the vocal track at all. We noticed this happening with other instruments like the guitar as well- if we dropped the guitar out, we couldn't hear the guitar on the track. Even worse, I played a Santana song on guitar, and for some reason even while playing, my guitar track was silenced for about 80% of the song. Why would I play a Santana song if not to hear the guitar? Why is this even part of the game?? It was not my TV or system. I literally was playing on a brand new TV. It is the game, and I'm not sure if it's a glitch or a setting (and if it's a setting, I don't know how to change it), but either way it is an unacceptable part of a release. This is a music game, and not being able to hear the music is kind of a deal-breaker. -I won't get into them much because it seems like all other reviews have been complaining about it, but the character and band customizing options are severely watered down. Want to change the body type of your character? Too bad, you either get to be "skinny boy" or "skinny girl". Not only are there less options than the wonderful Rock Band 3, but the customizing is worse than even Rock Band 1. How can this be? How can a new-gen game be worse and have fewer options than its first incarnation from 8 years ago? -I know this depends on each person's individual music taste, but to me this is by far the weakest on-disc song selection of any Rock Band game, including Lego Rock Band and the Nintendo DS Rock Band games. There are really only about 4 songs on the disc that we were excited to play, so that can get old pretty fast unless you already have a large library of purchased songs. Oh that's right, they butchered that. -The large array of music from different genres is nice, however there are some songs or genres that people will never play and are... irritating to even hear. For me personally, that would be death metal. This wouldn't be a problem, except the game constantly plays a random song in the background while navigating the menu or doing literally anything other than playing a song. I don't want to hear Satan screaming at me as I'm changing options or customizing something or just idle in the menu. This may sound dumb but it happened frequently and became EXTREMELY obnoxious. There needs to be an option to turn off particular songs that you NEVER want to hear or play, or change what songs are randomly played in the background. It's not all bad. Despite all of the listed disappointments and issues, we still did have fun playing for the most part. There is a new free-form guitar solo option where you can make up your own solos within existing songs, which is a fun addition, but it can also cause you to feel like you're ruining the song if your random button pressing doesn't pan out. Luckily though, it can be turned off. I still love playing Rock Band, but essentially I'm having trouble wondering why I would play this version over the Xbox 360 version that I already have? I'm trading literally HUNDREDS of songs, that I have paid money for, for a small handful of new on-disc songs, along with frustrating bugs and less overall production value. I can't help but feel that Rock Band 4 is another game following the troubling trend of being launched onto the market unfinished, on the assumption that later patches and updates will complete the experience. This boggles my mind, because why would consumers buy a game after it has gotten horrible reviews, in the hopes it will be fixed? This isn't a terrible game on its own necessarily, and you may have fun playing it, but when taking everything into consideration, it's an embarrassing release from Harmonix. I'm not giving up on this game because I love Rock Band, but I sincerely hope they address and fix the myriad of issues quickly.