It has been quite a while since I've had a good excuse to pull out the old Ibanez sitting in my closet collecting dust, but BandFuse: Rock Legends' mix of rhythm game rocking and guitar training provided an excellent incentive. It blurs the line between musical rehearsal and plain-old fun, giving everyone from total guitar novices to more seasoned players the tools to rock out while improving their chops. While it might lack some of the more useful extras and visual pizzazz of the recent

To that aim, BandFuse's learner-focused ShredU section packs lots of tutorial videos and inspirational vignettes from guitar pros like Slash, Mike Ness, Zakk Wylde, and more. While only a handful are interactive, they're very informative, assuming you're in the mood to sit and watch hours of footage rather than actually play. The Lick Lab and Practice menus are more useful if you're in a hands-on mood, because they let you tweak the speed of any song in the game to practice at a slower pace and even loop specific parts until you've mastered them. These diversions are helpful if you're looking to learn, even if they're not as entertaining as the musical minigame found in the competition.

Whether you plug in a guitar or a bass, the instrument sound quality is top-notch, and both offer a different challenge with a wide assortment of tracks that will keep even the most skilled musicians on their toes. A trio of virtual FX pedals include adjustable levels of autowah, overdrive, and digital delay to tinker with. Between those and a handful of amplifiers, there's enough to fine-tune your sound even if the limited selection doesn't come close to satiating the needs of more dedicated pedal enthusiasts. You can also plug in a USB microphone to sing along, though both this and local multiplayer require extra adapters and hardware.

BandFuse's biggest strength is the way it balances its gameplay elements with more serious guitar practice.

BandFuse's user-friendly approach to guitar mastery strikes some chords that Rocksmith misses. The tab-based gameplay is accessible and easy to grasp, which makes shredding through this heavy-hitting batch of tunes an entertaining and educational romp for players of all skill levels. A limited scope of extra bells and whistles, along with sharp difficulty spikes between tiers, is an occasional turnoff, but the rush that comes from improving your playing over time until you can nail these songs note for note smoothes out some of the rough edges.