This game had potential, but ultimately, it's a waste of money.

The game is so riddled with bugs that it's unplayable. Good luck trying to complete songs and advance onto new levels, as the game will suddenly and randomly stop registering notes, even though you can hear your guitar through the game and absolutely no indication (like an arrow pointing to a different string if you're playing the wrong one, for example) that you're playing anything at all. Sure, the game ensures that your guitar is in tune at the beginning of each song, but that doesn't matter because the input processing in this game decides to cut out whenever it feels like it. Want to play a mini game to improve your playing technique? Well, I hope you don't plan on advancing too much because you'll only get a few minutes before the game decides, "hey, that sound isn't even a guitar, is it?"

And that's just the software side of things.

As if the sloppy software wasn't enough, you're also required to buy an overpriced, $30 proprietary USB cable in order to play the game. Surely, a one-time fee of $30 isn't bad for a game that will help you learn to play guitar, right? Well, I'd agree with that, except that these cables are extremely prone to failure and you'll have to keep shelling out $30 every few days, weeks or month to keep playing this broken game. So not only does the software randomly cut out and stop working, but the physical cords also just randomly die for no apparent reason. Don't believe me? Look up some Amazon reviews and take a look at their support forum. This is a known problem and has never been addressed. They simply don't care about this game.

It's pretty sad how many paid reviews there are for this game. If you don't want to get ripped off, avoid this game AT ALL COSTS.… Expand

Thrilled as I was with the Xbox version, the need for external speakers connected directly to the system (as in, no using the same TV for both visuals and speakers) prompted me to pick up the PC version on sale from Steam for the convenience of 3.5mm output jacks. Entirely worth the second purchase, there's no doubt in my mind. There's nothing I could say that hasn't already been expressed in the glowing reviews this game has received, and as much as I feel the points deserve reiteration, I'll leave it at that.… Expand

I bought this great Game to have fun with a friend i play with in a band. It´s absolute fantastic, you have to use a real guitar/bass and the songs are great. We almost play Rocksmith when our band meetings are cancelled or one member is missing.

I bought this game to finally learn guitar. Well I been playing it for a two months and can already play some songs. I tied once before to learn, but always go bored and quit. This game makes practice more like gaming. I practice probably 4 hours a day on the game, and only 30 min or so doing other things. After my first month I felt good enough about my progress I started taking lessons. Been 4 weeks since I started that. Honestly if you are playing this game and using the net on free guitar sites you are likely golden. If you can't learn guitar with this game, you just can't learn. It makes even ADHD people get into it. They need to make this for all instruments, I mean really it is an amazing concept.

I won't give it less than a 10. Because it is the first game in the world to do this. If you play guitar, or want to learn this IMO is a priority to buy second only to a guitar. It is the best game like it in the world, because literally no other game in the world is like it. Amazing.… Expand

Totally fun game. Bought it for my 12 year old daughter for her birthday, Dec 29 - Rocksmith through Steam (purchased over the Christmas sale, $107 with all DLC, yay!) The first few play-throughs of Blink182's "Small things" was pretty easy, but then the chords started flying. She had difficulty with them at first, until I pointed out that the game was presenting chord names (E5, etc). All of a sudden she was ... 'yah, I know that chord', and the fingers were in the correct positions (She has been playing/taking guitar lessons for a little over a year), I hadn't picked up my Fender P-Bass for over a year, but was playing coop with her - total fun. Some noticeable latency issues, but following the posted howto's on Steam forums, ubi forums, et al I was able to bring latency down to nothing. (Disabled her Creative Labs X-Fi, enabled Realtek onboard sound, and adjusted latency through Rocksmith.ini - LatencyBuffer=1, MaxOutputBufferSize=160 - with X-Fi was 4 and 1024!)

She is kicking my @ss at guitar, and giggling about it :D And dammit, my fingertips hurt!… Expand

Not only has this game got me practising my guitar more, but I've been having more fun doing it, getting less frustrated, and playing a whole range of songs that I wouldn't necessarily have tried to learn otherwise. And now that it's on the PC and there are unofficial addons, I can't see me tiring of this. Pretty much ever. I already use it to practise my own band's songs! Awesome stuff!

Has Re-Kindled my interest in Playing Guitar after years of my prized Fender T sitting in its case unused
Having played and enjoyed the fakeness off Guitar Hero it is refreshing to enjoy something where I feel my time is put to greater use. A game I never thought was possible so very impressed.

Cant wait for the Song Catalogue to expand.

first than nothing, this is not "a game" for everyone. There are many kind of gamer, and few ones can find this game as great as i do. This game means a great chance to to practice you arm, your eyes, you ear, and your fingers in the way to touch and play a guitar.

i has never played a guitar, and i has only 1 month and my will to keep playing only increases. PD: i dont want have a plastic guitar useless in my closet... with an no use knowledge… Expand

I used to play guitar years ago and tried to teach myself but gave up after about 12 months, didn't seem to get anywhere and lessons were very expensive. So my trusty axe ended up in its case at the back of the wardrobe until this came along. I dug out my guitar and had it re-stringed and checked over then bought Rocksmith. After a few hours of trying the various easy songs and techniques I started to improve. I've been playing this since release on the PC and already can get about 95% note accuracy on 4 songs, which isn't bad going seeing as I've only had the game a few weeks. The only bad thing about this was that it arrived with no CD key but a quick support ticket to Ubisoft and I was up and running after waiting a couple of hours. I like the way that the dynamic difficulty will change when you start to get better at a certain song, and if you do mess up it will downgrade the difficulty for you. Everybody complains about lag on this game but if you go to the Rocksmith forums then is a set up guide for the PC and if you follow that you shouldn't really have any problems. My video is running through HDMI and audio through a home cinema system and it sounds great, even annoys the neighbours!

There is a good selection of tracks to play and some are surprisingly fun to play, bands I wouldn't even be interested in I find playing a lot. I enjoy it so much that I've already spent around £60 on DLC for it and go on it every day for a couple of hours.

Be warned though, this isn't pick up and play like Guitar Hero or Rockband, this game takes practise and lots of it, which makes it rewarding. I spent one Friday night trying to get Smoke on the water up from 90% to 95% note accuracy. For beginners who have never played guitar before then a few tips. If after playing for a while and your fingertips are sore (or start to get blisters or skin peeling off) then stop playing until the next day, or your hand aches then once again stop playing until it's better. You will find after a week or two that this won't happen although your fretting hand will have rock hard skin on the fingertips. This is the most fun I've had in a computer game for a long while now and definitely worth the money.… Expand

Rocksmith is AMAZING! It's so accurate it is eliminating poor techniques I didn't know I had. This title is suitable for beginner to advanced. If you know someone who plays the guitar or has an interest in learning it this title will be a massive hit with them. Notice the critics give lower scores than users... because the critics aren't guitarists. Waiting eagerly for more DLC.

Rocksmith succeeds at what has kept me from playing my guitar for over a year: it has made practicing fun. Speaking as an avid Guitar Hero player, the reason I got interested in real guitar, finding songs on tabs that were just the right difficulty and fun to play was very hard. Couple this with poor technique making those few songs you could find sound terrible and it was downright demotivating. Finding the right difficulty in Rocksmith is no problem as it's fully automatic, and with the points system it's easy to track your progress. The software is also surprisingly accurate, in reply to kakupacal, the game 'greenlits' (flashes) whatever part of the chord you got right, but only get points for those specific notes and not the entire chord (though I'm not saying it's flawless). The demand for precision is also quite frustrating, you may feel you played something just right but the game remains fussy, and another pass-over after some practice reveals your technique needed work after all. While you will learn your way around a guitar, you need to remind yourself that Rocksmith is not really a teacher. It's a game that will give you the basic techniques you need to play guitar and the specific songs that come with it. In other words, it doesn't teach you, but you learn regardless by doing. This is especially apparent when I've been playing a song and getting better at it, when it suddenly throws some sections at me that are way too hard for me. I have had my 'f this' moments and closed the game, but all it really takes is the mentality to keep going back to it later and try it again. I also haven't been experiencing many lag issues like some others, it's about the right equipment for sound output (which the game even tells you). I will say it's not lag free, but for me it's not remotely enough to bother, especially when playing a song. A simple solution for this would be a humble splitter, turning guitar volume in the game to zero, and let your real life amp make the noise for you. Others have also had complaints about crashes, though in 25 hours of play I've gotten a total of 1 crash, which is nothing out of the ordinary in my opinion. A major flaw in this game though is the user interface. It has received no upgrades to take advantage of the keyboard and mouse. There is mouse support but you may as well use the keyboard and you have to tap sideways through individual tracks to find the one you want to play. Furthermore, there is no real way to get to a specific menu quickly (for instance, after playing a song and you want to change the arrangement, you need to first go back to the song menu, scroll to the song and select a different arrangement). The 'A' button takes you to a free play area with emulated amps you can set up yourself with unlockable guitars, pedals, amps etc, I just wonder why they didn't make more shortcuts like this, like 'S' for song menu, 'E' for events and 'M' for mini-games. Another issue is the fact the game won't run unless your sound is in 48000 Hz (16 or 24 bit, either works). This isn't bad quality per se, but I run different settings for my music and it's a tad annoying having to switch the audio settings each time I want to play. Lastly, the DLC comes in at … Expand

First: if you are considering buying this game, make sure your computer can run it. Second: If you want to learn guitar and want it to be fun Buy This Game. Ok, now that those are out of the way. Here is my opinion. Loading this game takes forever and that's a long time. it is 13gb of data that i assume are not on the disk. I have a decently fast internet at 20mbps and it still took a couple hours to download it all off steam. As for steam, if you buy this game you have to use it. If you don't have an internet connection do not buy this game because steam requires it. FYI i have been playing guitar for 21 years, and bass for 6. I did experience lag while playing which is annoying but most of it is gone after i read the pdf manual and tweaked the games settings. There are a lot of songs in the library some i have not heard, but are gems, some are annoying and you will do your best to learn enough of them to be able to master other ones that rock. They did a fantastic job on getting multiple effects in the game. They did not make it user friendly to get out of this game, the first time took me probably 5 min to figure out. You cant just hit the esc. key and exit. you need to be in the main screen and side scroll all the way to the right. There are some other minor annoyances that I encountered but overall it is a solid buy.… Expand

Rocksmith has seriously rekindled my interest in learning guitar again, it even got me to replace my crappy Fender knockoff with a nice Epiphone SG. This game is great for people starting out or people like me that learned for a year in high school but wasn't happy with the method they were being taught. Once you get used to the note reading system you really start making progress. The progressive learning system is quite good at addressing the issue of getting confused if you tried to learn a song from a tab and didn't have the patience to go the whole way with it.

Overall an awesome purchase if you have an electric guitar lying around (or the money to get one if you feel you aren't going to waste it). Only outstanding issue with Rocksmith is the current price of its DLC at around $3.50 a song. However, if you wait around a month and a half you may get to see some of this DLC reduced during Steam's Christmas sale.… Expand

Sadly, the PC version is a buggy, lazy port of the console version. Frequent hang-ups, system-freezing crashes, and lag that comes and goes based on its own mysterious whims. A glaring omission from the game is a mini-game to teach you the notes on the fretboard which would go a HUGE way towards really cracking the basics of understanding music theory.

Another complaint is that the note recognition software seems far too generous as I have occasionally bashed out idiot-chords that consisted of frantic fingers pressing the wrong strings in the wrong places and still been green-lit by the game in mid-song.

The developers have included several songs that barely feature the guitar (which is baffling) and a few songs that have odd, awkward melodies that are simply no fun to try and noodle out on the fly as colored blocks are vomited at the screen.

It's not all complaints. If you can look past the awkward UI, the game itself is mostly fun and will teach you a few useful guitar techniques as well as guide you towards learning whichever library songs catch your interest. I'd be far quicker to recommend this if not for the persistent glitches.… Expand

First let me say, the developers have successfully managed to take a terrible UI on the console versions and make it even worse on the PC. For instance, in the menus, esc doesn't go back a level. It also likes to mix up whether its the enter or the space bar is the selection key. This game doesn't teach you guitar, it teaches you how to play certain songs and build your skills. It would be a great supplement to someone learning guitar with lessons. I'm not that good at guitar, but I can still rock out in my living room and actually have it sound like a song. I still find the game extremely fun after playing it for it a year.
$3 for DLC is a bit steep, but I had to buy Black by Pearl Jam because it is one of the best (and most difficult song to play) ever… Expand

Game of the Year! Finally a game that translates into real-world benefits. While it might not make you a rockstar outside the game, it's teaching you all about the fundamentals, movements and coordination in a very fun way, I took guitar lessons 10 years ago and after 6 months I didn't feel like progress was made so I quite. In just 4 hours of Rocksmith play, I feel like I know more about Guitar then in those 6 months of lessons. I'm a firm believer that music education should NOT start with theory, music lessons, reading music... that's an excellent way to bore someone to death... Start with just playing, keep them interested and then learn/refine your skills years down the road. Rocksmith delivers on this perfectly. A+ on the dynamic difficulty and track selection. I'd like to ding a point for cost of downloadable content ($3 per song) but I've got months or work to do before I master the decent sized library already. I have zero lag and the guitar tuning, effects and overall sound is fantastic... I'm impressed and the last time that happened with a PC game was probably Valve's original Portal game 10 years ago.… Collapse

I've been a guitarist for a long time on and off and I was indeed one of the people who complained about guitar hero saying it doesn't actually teach you the right techniques and completely punishes you for trying to put a groove in place.

So imagine how vindicated I felt when Rocksmith appeared.

And then imagine how happy I was when this thing not only delivered but it delivered in spades!

Great for both learning and fun. There are tools to get you a better player, minigames to improve your playing and it manages to pull all this off without managing to feel like work.

Time will disappear... your playing will improve... you will get scored on the standard of playing....

This has rekindled my interest in the guitar.

I would have loved to give this a 10 out of 10 but sadly the tracking accuracy isn't 100%, it's really good in-game but occasionally fails on some of the minigames like ducks and scale runner as you batter the requested note in frustration.

So I will have to knock a number off due to this minor imperfection.… Expand