First Impressions: ROCKSMITH+ Feels Doomed to Fail

I have been so excited for Rocksmith+. Last week, Ubisoft released it to the world. It was quickly met with confusion and disappointment for various reasons. I wanted to try it for myself and Ubisoft was kind enough to provide me with a 3-month subscription so that I could take a look. All the thoughts that follow are my own, but you are welcome to try it out for yourself. Rocksmith+ is available now through the Ubisoft Store (affiliate link) starting at $14.99 a month on PC. I do want to note that this is labeled as a first impression instead of a review because it is a subscription service that barely launched. I hope to write a follow up after a couple of months to assess how the platform has evolved over that time to provide more of an indication of where it’s headed.

I just don’t know where to start. I think I’ll start with the highlights. Rocksmith+ feels smoother overall than its predecessor Rocksmith 2014. The note tracks look and feel nicer. The sheer number of songs is massive. As of writing, there are over 7,700 songs in the game. They added a ton of videos to help teach techniques and have categorized them based on approximate skill level. They have videos about health and wellness while playing such as your posture, stretches to warm up, and stretches to cool down. Those are very important things that rarely get talked about in the world of guitar. One of the big strengths of Rocksmith+ is the promise of additional content. They’ve announced that new songs and content will become available monthly (although they had previously said it would be more often). This is always good and because it’s a subscription you don’t have to buy the game and then buy a bunch of DLC. You get the full library with your subscription. Also, there are multiple ways to connect to the game. You can use a Real Tone Cable (¼” to USB), an audio interface (compatibility varies), or the Rocksmith+ Connect mobile app that uses your phone’s microphone to listen for the guitar/amp as you play. Finally, there are a ton of international artists which is really cool.

Now we get to the areas that I consider downgrades. For starters, the UI feels very busy and very cluttered and very overwhelming. Every time I load it up, I have to take a second to orient myself. This isn’t helped by the fact that they have a ton of song recommendations on the Home tab along with your favorite songs and your recently played and the content they’re promoting like their videos. Then, they have a whole other section called Play where you can find more songs categorized in a million different ways and then you have the Search section where you can look for songs based on a keyword or genre. It’s very busy.

Also, when you go to the Learn section, they have video lessons where people tell you about techniques and chords and stuff, but I’ve found that these aren’t paired with exercises like in Rocksmith 2014. You have to watch the video and then go search for a song with whatever technique or thing you just watched a 3-minute video on. It would’ve been much nicer if they followed the video with a simple exercise or a small list of songs that utilize whatever the video covered. In addition, Rocksmith+ has done away with the Guitarcade which was something a lot of players enjoyed as a way of practicing scales and techniques. I also haven’t found anything like Session Mode where you can just jam with a band. For a platform that talks about teaching guitar, it really feels like they’ve eliminated a lot of teaching tools they had.

As I mentioned before, there are 3 ways to connect your guitar or bass to Rocksmith+. I have tried all three and based on my experience, the mobile app is the worst as you might expect. The cable and interface options essentially plug your guitar directly into the game and there’s a bit of a delay that I felt, but it didn’t seem to affect my score at all. Meanwhile, with the app I was marked as missing a bunch of notes and chords that I know I hit and that’s to be expected when you’re essentially using a wireless microphone over a direct wired connection. If you can, I would avoid the app. I will also admit that there’s a chance the problem was how I had my phone placed and maybe if you spend the time to really find the sweet spot it works better, but if you already have a Real Tone Cable and/or audio interface, I’d just recommend those.

Now we get to the heart of why Rocksmith+ feels doomed. The song library leaves a ton lacking. I understand that getting licenses can be very challenging and/or expensive and so I do want to start this section with the acknowledgment that I’m sure licensing is a big reason for a lot of my gripes with this topic. One of the reasons I originally wanted Rocksmith 2014 was to be able to play some of my favorite songs by some of my favorite bands like Foo Fighters, Alter Bridge, Rise Against, Halestorm, blink-182, Green Day, etc. All of those artists are available in the base game or were made available via DLC. I made the silly mistake of thinking that these bands would all license songs for Rocksmith+. Not a single one that I just mentioned has a song available on the new platform. It doesn’t end there. When I hear the name Rocksmith, I obviously think of rock music and famous rock bands. When you search by genre, Rock and Metal take up maybe 1/10 of the library. Sometimes you can find a big name like Alice Cooper or Opeth in there, but I don’t know them outside of their names. They don’t pull me in to play their songs. Now, I am a fan of Bowling For Soup and noticed that they had a number of songs in the game. They had one song that I recognized and I’ve listened to quite a bit of Bowling For Soup. This points to a pattern I noticed though. If a bigger name is included in Rocksmith+, you maybe get one or two of their songs that people recognize if you’re lucky and the rest are all songs no one has heard of. There’s also just a weird disconnect for who’s included.

I want to start this next section with a huge note. There are a lot of international artists that I’ve found in the game and I do think that’s awesome. There are Japanese, Latinx, etc. musical groups that I’ve never heard of and now they’re getting a new audience and I think it’s awesome to have them on here. Back to my rant.

A lot of the songs make very little sense. Who know who’s really known for the guitar in their songs? Kristen Chenoweth. I love Chenoweth. She’s fantastic and she can sing like crazy. I’ve never heard one of her songs and thought, “I need to learn the guitar part.” I don’t even know if her songs have guitar in them. I can understand having some songs by pop artists like Britney Spears and *NSYNC. These were popular acts and I could definitely see ways you could make cool guitar parts for them. Heck, I’ll even accept The Wiggles. However, Pentatonix is on here. You know, the a capella group. A capella, the genre of music that is about making music with only your voice. I have nothing against Pentatonix. They have some fun songs. Why are they in a game that revolves around guitar? Looking at the song list, it looks like Ubisoft went to record labels, asked for song licenses, and the labels gave them a box of forgotten scraps. I can’t speak for everyone and if these are the songs that get you excited, great! However, it has been a struggle for me to find songs that I’m interested in. I finally found a song to get me pumped to play (“Seven Deadly Sins” by Man with a Mission), but a single song won’t hold me over for very long.

That’s not the only problem with the song list though. As of writing, Rocksmith+ says that it has 7,762 songs. Of those, 960 songs have a Lead track (931 of those were made by the Rocksmith+ team) and 153 have a Rhythm track (143 of those were made by the Rocksmith+ team). I know at least some of those numbers overlap meaning that there’s only approximately 1/7 of the library available to learn actual guitar parts for. 7,759 songs in the library have Chord Charts. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a new feature for Rocksmith+ where the song plays and instead of the notes coming down, it just has chord diagrams come down at the chord changes. This isn’t a terrible tool per se, but when that is 90% of your game that’s supposed to be dedicated to helping people learn to play the guitar it feels like a slap to the face. Chord charts are extremely plentiful online for free or through music books. Having them come down a track is a negligible improvement over seeing them on a piece of paper.

One final note about the song list is that it will change based on your region. For example, if you live in Germany, you can have access to “Master of Puppets” by Metallica. If you live in the United States, you do not get access to that quintessential metal song. However, you can use a VPN to access it.

Rocksmith+ does have the Rocksmith Workshop where you can create arrangements for songs and then others can play them. I haven’t played around with this feature yet, which is why there’s no mention of it before.

I remember there being rumors based on job postings about Rocksmith+ possibly having tools for drummers, keyboardists/pianists, and vocalists. That would definitely explain a lot of the song library. Unfortunately, for a guitar and bass focused game, what we’ve been given feels extremely lacking and laughable. Not to mention, it feels almost insulting. In my opinion, the improvements do not outweigh the downgrades. Rocksmith+ feels like it’s still in beta and incomplete, but shipped out just to shut people up. I really hope that in these first couple of months there are some major improvements to just about every aspect of the game. What has your experience been? Have you tried out Rocksmith+ yet? Do you plan on it? Tell me if you think I’m dead wrong about my initial impressions in the comments.