On one hand, as someone who literally only listens to video game OSTs, this was a great introduction to lots of different types of music!

On the other hand, I suck at rhythm games.

I guess I liked it fine enough though.

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'm tired of being what you want me to be
Feeling so faithless, lost under the surface
Don't know what you're expecting of me
Put under the pressure of walking in your shoes
Every step that I take is another mistake to you
(Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow)
I've become so numb
I can't feel you there
Become so tired
So much more aware
I'm becoming this
All I want to do
Is be more like me
And be less like you
Can't you see that you're smothering me
Holding too tightly, afraid to lose control?
'Cause everything that you thought I would be
Has fallen apart right in front of you
Every step that I take is another mistake to you
(Caught in the undertow, just caught in the undertow)
And every second I waste is more than I can take
I've become so numb
I can't feel you there
Become so tired
So much more aware
I'm becoming this
All I want to do
Is be more like me
And be less like you
And I know
I may end up failing too
But I know
You were just like me with someone disappointed in you
I've become so numb
I can't feel you there
Become so tired
So much more aware
I'm becoming this
All I want to do
Is be more like me
And be less like you
I've become so numb
I can't feel you there
(I'm tired of being what you want me to be)
I've become so numb
I can't feel you there
(I'm tired of being what you want me to be)

Out of all the three new modes introduced in Chapter 5, Fortnite Festival is easily the best, as a fan of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. The gameplay is almost identical to Rock Band, but tweaked for playing on a keyboard, which I think is a benefit. Guitar controller support is supposed to be coming soon from what I heard. The song selections are also great, with a wide variety of genres. And even a few original songs are in there too. The drawback though is that they're all on rotation, but can be purchased permanently in the item shop for relatively cheap, and if one person owns it, everyone can play it, which is much better than how DLC songs were handled in Rock Band 4.

Although I think my biggest disappointment in Festival is the lack of motion capture, which really gave the GH/RB games a lot of it's charm (and hilarity with mods). This may have been done to save space which is respectable, but it's such a huge missed opportunity. Regardless of that, it's still a pretty good mode, even if imo it's not as good as the GH/RB games.

No replay option? Crashes every time I play more than two songs with people online but not solo? Constant lag spikes? Horrible aesthetics? Frequently awful song picks? Battle pass? Yep, everything I'd expect from an Epic Games rhythm game. I'd say poor Harmonix for being contracted into developing absolute garbage, but I'm sure they feel sad about the nice Fortnite payday they're getting. (Though if Epic isn't paying them fairly - which wouldn't surprise me - then I would actually feel bad for them!)

Up top, I love seeing Harmonix finally given a win. I have loved Harmonix as a company for so long but outside of the original Guitar Hero games and the first two Rock Bands I don't think they've made anything that didn't completely flop. I hope Epic is paying them a ton.

But uhhh... this isn't exactly Rock Band 5 unfortunately. It's good, but has some really iffy monetization ideas and some really unpolished looking visuals when actually playing. (Love that one single vocalist loop where they sway back and forth.) Was looking forward to having full instrument support only for that update to come with the condition that you buy either a controller that's 10 years out of print or a new controller that costs $150 and they seemingly made 10 of total. It feels REALLY stupid and greedy and I can't just bind the advanced keys and use the same PS2 controller I use for Clone Hero.

That's the big thing for me. This has to compete with Clone Hero, and I know that's hard but I think a lot of people are really open to supporting this official Harmonix made equivalent but they're making it really tough. Everything's too expensive and artificially gatekept in ways that aren't addictive but simply off-putting.

Remember when later Guitar Hero games had songs that can't do anything but have boring easy-mode charts? Yeah, that's this.
Pair it with a really shitty rotation model where if you want to play a song for any other period than when it shows up for a few days, you have to pay 5 whole dollars for it and only when it's in the item shop, and you've got Fortnite Festival.

Pair it with incredibly boring visuals, as you've got a very ugly giant stage with band animations going below even GH2 quality, but hey, during those long breaks certain instruments will get in songs due to a bad track-list, you can use your emotes!
There's really no huge flair either, there's nothing like the audio getting filtered when using Overdrive, the particles while you're using it are very small and tied almost entirely to just your player, and most of them are battle pass/shop purchases anyways.

Generally it just is very clunky as well, you can't quick restart a song or practice it, instead you can just jump into the song from the start and if you fuck up you have to back out to the main-stage with on some songs this being a downtime of like 40s.
You've also got to deal with the fact that all the notes share the same color so on harder tracks (if you can actually FIND one) it's a bit annoying to deal with as it's harder to read for no other reason than it has to be the Fortnite purple color.
Lastly there's just a lot of instabilities, It's on the second season now and there's still major issues with just random hitching in the middle of songs (far better than it used to be at-least) and crashes happen randomly as well.

AAA Licensed Rhythm games are pretty much dead, and this is the best you'll get out of it in the modern industry, just move on and go download like Clone Hero or YARG or something.

Epic, Stop trying to make metaverse Fortnite happen, It's not going to happen, nobody plays the shitty racing mode, Festival is mediocre, Lego Fortnite has been nothing but boring and the Creative mode's expansion has pretty much exclusively been used to make things that you could already play, like arenas or boxfights etc. but now they have a random theme of Streamer/Country/IP, or just are something I could have played in ROBLOX back in 2009, it's not working and players are just going to jump to the one where they already have all the different things they want to make.

[3/11/24]

A rhythm game in the vein of classic Guitar Hero and Rock Band without needing to shell out hundreds of dollars or going to Dave & Busters, all in a game I already play? Sign me up! This was easily my most anticipated mode out of the three, but mostly because I already have a history with rhythm games of this variety. Come December 9, and... well, it's enough to satiate my rhythm game desire, at least.

The most obvious issue with this game is how limited the charts need to be to compensate for controllers. There's a noticably thicker line in between lanes 2 and 3 designed to separate the D-Pad and face buttons. There will never be a chord where both notes are on one side of the line and that's pretty lame. Half the fun of Guitar Hero/Rock Band is having that guitar and feeling like you're good at something you're not, but no official support as of yet leaves me with a controller and an awkward feeling. The feedback is also pretty lackluster and the charts are pretty piss easy, even after speeeding up the track. I get having to appeal to people who've never played a rhythm game before, but come on.

Monetization is easily the worst part of this mode. The Festival Pass is 1,800 VBucks, 850 more than the standard Battle Pass. Only thing I can see justifying it is licensing fees. Nothing else aside from the icon skin at the end really is that impressive. Instruments, up until a few weeks back, could only be used in Festival, but now they can also be used in BR with certain emotes. Jam Loops is just Fuser if multiple people were needed. The larger sin is making each song 500 VBucks each. Without those, you're at the mercy of a small rotating list. I at least have Save The World's Founder bonuses to grind VBucks.

Instrument support is coming soon, and I'm still questioning on whether or not I'll shell out a couple hundred for a plastic guitar, but currently, Fortnite Festival is just doing the bare minimum to satisfy me. I remain optimistic.