Rocksmith+ review: an amazing tool that will lift your wallet

Rocksmith+ is the perfect assistant to help you learn a musical instrument, just don't forget about the subscription.

Rocksmith+ logo / Ubisoft

I’ve always wanted to learn to play the piano. A good while ago I bought a Casio MIDI keyboard intending to do just that, but after a few YouTube videos about chords and scales and some very basic melodies, I gave up. I taught myself to play guitar and bass as a teenager, and I figured I’d just be able to do it again but with a different instrument. As it turns out, those were the beliefs of an arrogant fool with an attention span that has shrunk with age and an inability to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

Fast-forward a few years, and Rocksmith+ finally launches on console, complete with the ability to plug in a MIDI keyboard and start learning piano instantly. After some hesitance, I invested in a decent USB cable and Ubisoft’s proprietary “Rocksmith Real Tone Cable” so I could play about with my guitar and bass when I was done learning. I still wanted to learn to play piano after all, and Rocksmith+ promised that it would teach me while I basically play Guitar Hero. 

In fairness, that promise is fulfilled. I plugged in my keyboard, played around with a few of the songs available in the free trial, and begrudgingly invested in a Rocksmith+ subscription – yes, this is a subscription-based game, you can’t buy it for a flat price like Rocksmith 2014. While Rocksmith+’s song library isn’t incredible, I found some great songs I recognize and adore, in addition to a few unfamiliar tracks I soon found myself humming along to. There are a few too many songs from soundtracks like XDefiant and Assassin's Creed, mind.

Rocksmith+ bass track. / Ubisoft

One of those is Seal’s Kiss From A Rose. Yes, the one from the Batman Forever soundtrack. This is one of the greatest songs ever made, without question, and I made it an early target to slowly increase difficulty and speed with this song until I could play it in its entirety. As it turns out, playing an instrument is pretty hard.

I was so confident, too. I thought I could waltz in, pick up a keyboard, and grind out a song until it somehow clicked, but that’s not quite how it works. Hand positioning, stretching and shifting, moving up and down the keyboard as appropriate – as it turns out, you actually need to develop some skill to play complex music on a piano. Who knew?

So I dipped into the Basic Lessons, and this is where my Rocksmith journey truly began. You can only “clear” a lesson once you’ve managed to play through the example song with at least 80% accuracy at full speed – and if you want to learn, you should probably set a personal goal of 95% or more. Each lesson begins and is sometimes punctuated with video clips of real piano instructors giving you the information you need to play the upcoming track. First, they’ll request you play with your right hand only, then the left, and finally you combine both to play a masterpiece. 

I won't lie, I can't play this. / Ubisoft

The ability to adjust speeds or even have the game recommend song sections for you to repeatedly practice is a lovely touch that helps Rocksmith+ feel more like an educational tool than a game, but it is a bit uneven in places. For example, “easier” versions of songs with fewer notes simply take the full track and divide the number of notes in any section. This means complex sections are made marginally easier, while simple sections may ask you to play a single note, which feels off-beat and weird without accompaniments and is arguably harder to play the full suite of notes.

If you pay attention and follow the instructions, it’s a genuinely educational and fun time. All of those beginner techniques I mentioned earlier are broken down step-by-step, and you can repeat practice tracks while adjusting the speed, or even having the game pause at each note until you play it. You can take as long as you want repeating and practicing these tracks, and once you come out the other end with a good grasp of it, you’ll feel accomplished. It’s the same vibe as struggling against a Dark Souls boss – you can see where to hit each button, but actually pressing them on time still feels like a big challenge. Except, y’know, music.

I spent a few weeks slowly working my way through the Basic lesson plan for piano while playing a few songs on guitar and bass in between – when you’re not learning how to play an instrument, it feels a lot more like a traditional Guitar Hero-style rhythm game, just with a very complicated controller. The lesson plan was slightly uneven, with some of the later lessons feeling far easier to accomplish than earlier ones, but even with that hiccup I felt great about my experience. The only real dampener on the whole thing was the pervasive, unignorable latency.

Rocksmith+'s lessons are surprisingly good. / Ubisoft

Rocksmith+ on console is laggy. Not in terms of actual performance – the game isn’t visually intensive and utilizes 120FPS output to keep things smooth – but in terms of the time between me playing a note and the console playing it back to me. Whether on MIDI keyboard or guitar/bass, with the TV in its low-latency game mode, and the PS5’s audio settings adjusted for best response times, it was undeniably laggy. If I turned up the volume on my keyboard, I’d hear it play a note well before the console played it back. 

I don’t know whether this is an inherent problem with the PS5, or if it’s Ubisoft’s (surprisingly complex and robust) suite of audio effects that add extra latency, but it’s something you need to adjust to, and it’s not a problem if you attempt to play the same game on PC. The PC client is virtually lag-free to the ear, and after training myself to excel on the PS5 client, I found myself consistently pressing notes early on the PC version, revealing my brain’s built-in lag compensation.

When learning to play an instrument, and primarily learning to play by playing along to songs, having a noticeable amount of lag is devastating. It ended up changing the way I attempted to play notes on piano, and when playing along to music on guitar/bass it often said I played notes late. 

You can change the target difficulty of the arrangement, and if you want to use one hand or two. / Ubisoft

If you’re interested in Rocksmith+, jump into the PC version and stay there. Your Ubisoft account will carry your progress across platforms, thankfully, but buying a subscription on PS5 won’t give you access to the full game on PC.

That latency can be overcome with determination – though it should be top of the list of things for Ubisoft’s dev team to improve – and you’ll need determination if you don’t want to feel robbed. It all comes back to the Rocksmith+ subscription service, and the notification my phone gave me this morning as Ubisoft took another month’s sub money from me. I bought a keyboard and I let it gather dust for multiple years before Rocksmith+ gave me the motivation I needed to spend more time with it, and I’m genuinely grateful for that. But I’ve been busy for a few weeks now and Rocksmith+ has fallen to the wayside just as my keyboard did, only this time it’s charging me money for forgetting. It’s just like buying an instrument and intending to learn but with recurring charges.

I still haven’t learned to play Seal’s Kiss From A Rose, by the way. It’s a fair bit tougher than I expected, but I’m not giving up yet. Rocksmith+ has taken my money for another month – and on the laggier PS5, whether I like it or not – and I’m going to make the most of it. I’ll at least clear through the Intermediate piano lessons, and play bass to a few Mobb Deep tracks. This arrogant fool has been humbled through this whole process, but it’s been great to drop the ego and go back to basics. Nothing quite makes you appreciate how far you’ve come like going back to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

Score: 8/10

Platform: PS5