Rocksmith® 2014 Edition REMASTERED LEARN & PLAY Reviews

lol the DLC packs were all under $1 before the Steam Spring Sale now with that they've been bumped up to $3.99+ with the discount... very scummy. Should have kept supporting this game instead of moving to a subscription based model with Rocksmith+ I'm thankful for CDLC (custom dlc songs) which for anyone reading you can find more about on the rocksmith subreddit or just google Rocksmith CDLC, its super easy to set up and you don't have to pay for songs or pay for a shitty overpriced subscription service that they'll keep increasing the price on anyway. suck a fart out of a camels butt Ubisoft

It's great for learning how to play, Just difficult to set up and get audio, took me forever

Not even on sale. They should just make it free, it's over a decade old and no longer has any licensed content (there are literally no songs in the "Learn a Song" Menu). The only means to add songs now is to use customs forge or some other equally poorly designed website where some random on the internet most likely just guesses what notes need to be hit to play a given song, and that's after you jump through hoops to make an account only to realize you have to have other accounts for the file hosts (google, dropbox, mega, etc) as no site where you can find this content actually hosts the files. This is just a cash grab by ubisoft, don't give them your money.

In just 39 hours of playtime my bass skill level went from Roger Waters to Chris Squire. I HIGHLY recommend finding custom songs online to get the most out of this game.

piece of junk crashes on startup and you have to do crazy workarounds to get it to work. not worth it.

Game will legitimately not function or even launch if you have too many sound devices or too new of a CPU. If you use Elgato Wave Link, don't even bother buying the game you won't be able to play it.

RockSmith: A great concept ruined by one of the worst studios in gaming. Update: Official DLC songs would not play, verified game files and now it crashes on launch. I had to install a community file (cache.psarc) to use a non official Jack to USB cable. This is simply the most dysfunctional game I have ever bought and why I choose to pirate most games now. You can play guitar or bass, I go with bass and it has it's own set of problems I will get into. I only bought the steam release of this because pirated versions cannot use the Custom Songs (CDLC) and it was 3 dollars so I sold some trading cards and got it. I hate myself for giving ubisoft money. The games lag corrector is very basic and not helpful. It's supposed to make it so users who don't have a stereo system hooked to their PC (or PS3) can play without the notes being delayed from the audio, but it doesn't work. Ideally they would have taken a page from the book of one of the Guitar Hero entries (I can't remember which one, but one of them has you play a short song to correct the audio delay.) Tuning is an absolute mess, especially on bass. So before you play a song, it shows you a model of your guitar layout chosen, and it works like those guitar tuner apps. It is done so poorly. It has a gauge with an arm and a number, and you need to get it at least between -1 and +1 but it's almost impossible. The game gives you a 2 second window before it decides that -5 or +6 is perfectly fine. You cannot change this, it automatically goes to the next string and will do the same thing. Once I tune it all, I go into the pause menu once the song loads to see my E string is off by 12 semitones, holy shit what a mess. This absolutely affects the game detecting if you hit notes or not, it's vital to be in perfect tune to play the game and to learn your instrument. Not only that, but if you mute your string to cancel the confirmation of your tuning for that string, the gauge arm will go all the way up and the number will reset so you have to keep fighting with the 2 second window of success. It doesn't take in account that for strings like the E string on a bass guitar, the string will down tune itself when you let go of your tuning peg because your releasing tension. If your playing multiple songs with different turnings in a session, it will drive you up a fucking wall. It's madness, and the only way for you to get around it is to use the smaller tuner in the pause menu or on the main menu. The sound calibration is also terrible. I use a non official Jack to USB cable for my bass, which makes it so you cannot hear your bass in the game and I think it also causes issues with calibration. If you don't pluck your bass strings like your trying to rip them off, there's a good chance the game won't count it as a note hit. I've tried multiple times to get it right by playing very hard and playing very soft and nothing works. I don't want my fingers to pulsate with pain after every song for crying out loud! It also wares down on your muscles and makes your hand cramp. The 3 most important things being audio delay correction, tuning and guitar audio calibration could not have been fucked up more than they have with this game. You also cannot use your mic or hear people talk in voice chat apps while your in the game, even if you did not set up your mic to be used in the game. Other people have reported that multiple audio devices being plugged into your system will make the game just crash. Also, you have to have your guitar plugged in before launching or it won't work. I stated before that if your tuning is off even slightly the game will not recognize you playing the note and count it as either a miss or that your on the wrong fret. The game will also do this for no reason, and I think its because the audio is delayed and it can turn a fun jam with your favorite song into frustration in seconds when you know your playing in rhythm with the song. The game will also count notes you have not hit for some odd reason, I cannot imagine why. These problems make playing the game very aggravating when it should be an easy and enjoyable experience. Your supposed to play in rhythm with the music, not the notes on the screen. If you know what notes to hit, you should be able to do it with your eyes closed and get most of the notes. I find that even when I am playing the song perfectly, I still miss quite a few notes somehow which factors into your progression of the song. If you manually set the song difficulty, it will reset after like 2 bars back to 20 without dynamic difficulty. This game has no charm what so ever in the visual department. The UI is basic and soulless. The background for the menu changes depending on your mastery of songs, but it looks bland and boring. It doesn't scream "Yeah, I'm gonna become a rock star!" It sort of uses an inside voice to say "Let's get to the basics". Guitar Hero, the game it is trying to emulate was full of passion, nice art direction and a lot of style. It made you feel like you were in a small band playing bar gigs and making your way up. This in comparison makes you feel like a girl doing acoustic bedroom cover songs for youtube. It literally looks like a generic youtubers bedroom for the most part. Where is the attitude? Every time you boot this game up, it will ask you to login to Uplay, and when you select a profile it will try logging into Uplay and tell you it failed. To my knowledge, this game has no online play. It might be split screen? There is no reason to have Uplay other than useless achievements and DLC, oh but we are GETTING to the DLC don't worry. Ubisoft has removed DLC from people who have already bought it because they have refused to renew the license, likely to force people into paying for RockSmith+ which is basically a subscription like a streaming service. I despise subscription services with a passion and I'm not going to cave in for RockSmith just because they added piano. They will likely not keep your favorite songs on there due to license expiration and I'm sure they will put up piracy measures to keep people from downloading custom songs. The best thing they could do is strike a deal with Spotify and have its whole catalog available for RockSmith+ but ubisoft was never known for being smart. The community is centralized on 1 website where they have full control of what is discussed, what songs are allowed and who's allowed to use them. The game requires you to use an application to enable the use of CDLC songs, however if your copy is pirated or the software thinks it is it will not allow you to modify your copy to use custom songs. This ignores the fact that not everyone can afford the game, some countries don't have it available, some people have already bought it on other platforms or accounts, and that it's just petty. It's like they secretly work for ubisoft or something, typical redditors moralf*gging over a greedy corporation. Once you get past the terrible tuner in the game, figure out how to play without audio delay, finally get custom DLC to work and find songs that have good tabs made for them, it's a pretty good game. The narrator is kind of patronizing and talks to you like a stupid kid but you can turn him off for most things. Just make sure you pirate all the official DLC, ubisoft is going to take it away from you anyway so why play by the rules they set. I was actually banned from the discussion for suggesting someone to pirate the DLC songs they removed from the game. Apparently its OK to remove DLC from people who already bought it because they're too greedy to renew a license for a 40 year old song, but suggesting people own the software they bought is a punishable offence.

Great for experienced players or beginners. A huge library of tracks to play along to without the inconvenience of messing around with amp settings. Definitely a buy.

Ubisoft, congratulations! You’ve somehow managed to ruin a game from 2014—in 2025—by re-releasing it on Steam without its original content. A game that was once great is now just a hollow shell, all because you want to force players into subscribing to Rocksmith+, your greedy, overpriced service. No, thanks, Ubisoft. I’m not interested in paying again for something I already owned, only to get less. This is just another shameless cash grab, and you’ve officially hit a new low. Greedy company...

Explain this game in a sentence? "Guitar Hero with real guitar" I've been playing this for few years on and off but I gotta say that CDLC (a.k.a custom songs mod) is the best thing about this game, even though the legality might be debatable, but it keeps the game and its community alive for years even now in 2025. This game got delisted in 2023 because I think they wanted to push Rocksmith+ (which IMO was Ubisoft's biggest flop ever lol) to have more players, but it also got a re-release the next year haha. I'm impressed for what the game can do, I mean guitar is kind of complicated instrument to translate into digital, it has palm muting, hammer-on, pull-off and a lot more techniques to play, but this game can detect them pretty well, not perfectly of course, because it still relies on notes detection and guitar is an instrument with repeating notes so it can be played without following string and fret positioning as long as you play the right notes (even technically it can be played with keyboards). Today I found out that I can emulate bass internally with it, so I guess I don't need to buy a bass that I won't use lol. There is a workaround that can improve the game by A LOT, I have Reaper (a DAW) that can be used alongside this, most songs I play are played in like 10+ variations of tunings, changing tunings can be a tricky thing especially if you don't have 10+ guitars which I don't, so I can change tuning with a pitch shifter VST in Reaper to pre-process my guitar input before it goes into Rocksmith. Bad things about this game are the functionality as a windows program: lack of borderless windowed mode, audio output cannot be captured by screen recorder (without workaround), it's always on top, so other program can't be overlayed on top of it, setting some things required to modify .ini files in the game directory. Also, Real Tone Cable is not required, you can use an audio interface thanks to the modder who made it possible, or a microphone if you're crazy (jk, but you actually can).