See also the Facebook companion app Rock Band World.
Rock Band Blitz contains examples of:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: In this game, you earn coins by completing songs based on your star rating, or winning player challenges. However, you need coins to buy the use of powerups each time you played a song (even if you restarted a song!), and in most cases, it was impossible to five- or gold-star a song if you didn't use powerups. In the game's original release, the rate of reward-to-cost was rather low, requiring players to either face off against each other or completing challenges via the Facebook application. About a week or so after release, Harmonix slightly lowered the cost of power-up payments, averting the economy problem.
- Big Rock Ending: So you thought that songs with a Big Rock Ending bonus require you just to whale on the buttons? Nope. They're charted as normal notes. Granted, the ending of the song doesn't matter as much as the rest of the song (in terms of scoring), but a veteran Rock Band player can be caught off-guard when they realize there's notes instead.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Rock Band Blitz has a different color lane for each instrument in the song: green drums, red bass, yellow guitar, blue vocals, orange keys. Even here, orange is often trouble, as many key charts are sparse, and out of the way at the edge of the road, next to vocals which can also be sparse. This leads to moments where keys prevent the multiplier limit from being raised unless carefully tended to. Even the basic tutorial warns about this.
- Downloadable Content: One will quickly begin to realize that the 25 songs included with the game aren't enough. The game will happily play over 99% of the downloadable and exportable songs available to the main series. If you play a downloadable song from an artist that had new DLC released that week, you'll earn more rewards for finishing the song.
- Earn Your Fun: Somewhat. While all songs are available to play, you will have to work to unlock the use of the power-ups. And the better ones are unlocked later. Added to that, you must pay in-game currency for the use of power-ups in a song which you can only earn by completing songs well.
- Easy-Mode Mockery: The game will render the playing charts based on the song's Expert difficulty. No exceptions. Let's be fortunate that the engine will happily ignore Harmonies and Pro versions.
- 100% Completion: A couple of the achievements/trophies require the player to 5-star or Gold-star every song in the main list. The other notoriously hard one is playing 500 unique songs, requiring a hefty DLC library and a lot of grinding.
- Melismatic Vocals: For each time the vocalist changes pitch within a syllable, it is charted as a different note rather than a continuation of the same note.
- Nerf: The Flame Notes power-up has downgraded from a
Game-Breaker to Joke Power-up in an update... then was restored. - Old Save Bonus: Exports from past games in the series, as well as DLC, can be played in this game.
- One-Man Band: To perform well on a song, one will be required to play all the instrument parts of the song and must consistently switch between them. While it's not enforced, not doing so will net you a severely low score. There is a power-up called "Bandmate" will make the game play an instrument for you for a short while, allowing you to concentrate on other parts. Notably, "they" will play perfectly.
- Running Gag: Lead designer Brian Chan is brought up a lot in loading screens.
