The name may elicit images of hard rockers in a quaint caf holding acoustic guitars and singing mellow renditions of their greatest hits, but that’s not what Rock Band: Unplugged is about. This game maintains the same well-balanced tracklist of its console cousins, but the actual gameplay has a lot more in common with Harmonix’s early PlayStation 2 rhythm games, particularly Amplitude. It’s a solid portable rhythm game, and developer Backbone has done a great job with the license, but Unplugged’s omissions hurt the overall experience.

Instead of rocking out with your friends, Unplugged makes you juggle all four tracks — guitar, bass, vocals, and drums — by yourself. You can customize the controls however you like, but under the default scheme, you press Left, Right, Triangle and Circle in time to the music and switch tracks with the L and R buttons. Even for Rock Band and Guitar Hero veterans, it might take some getting used to, because as anyone who’s played Amplitude will tell you, fewer buttons doesn’t necessarily make for easier finger choreography. Missing notes loses you fans with whatever instrument you’re playing, and if you do badly enough, that instrument will fail out. Though you can bring it back into the fold with Star Power up to three times — a setup well familiar to anyone who’s played the console Rock Band(s).