A scene from Rock Band 3. (MTV Games)

A lot of people are suffering from music game fatigue. After umpteen Guitar Hero and Rock Band releases over the past few years, the genre has pretty clearly been done (and milked) to death.

Rock Band 3 is a return to the innovation that made the first Rock Band title such a big improvement over Guitar Hero.

It's good to see, then, that the pioneer of the genre – Cambridge, Mass.-based Harmonix – is working hard at breathing new life into it.

Harmonix came up with the concept of Guitar Hero – where players press buttons on a plastic guitar in time with notes scrolling on screen – before the company was acquired by MTV Networks. The Guitar Hero franchise, however, went to Activision, leaving Harmonix to expand the concept to include drums and vocals for Rock Band (2008), another smash hit that birthed a new franchise.

Rock Band 3, available now for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii, is a return to the innovation that made the first Rock Band such a big improvement over Guitar Hero. Rather than slap a new coat of paint on a familiar formula and simply add different songs, Harmonix has instead tried to answer the top criticism of such music rhythm games: that they're nothing like playing the real instruments.

As such, Rock Band 3 has additional "Pro" modes for guitar, bass, drums and a new instrument added to the mix: keyboards. Players can continue enjoying the game as before, hitting five coloured buttons on their guitars or drum pads, or opt for a more realistic experience. The downside of this new functionality is the need for pricey new peripherals.

In the case of guitar, the Pro peripheral – which at the time of writing is in short supply at retail – costs about $150 and features more than 100 buttons in place of strings and frets. The game provides good training lessons that will indeed give players a basic grounding in how to play a guitar. But, like the real thing, it's a process that takes patience and time to master. Same goes for the drums. To play in Pro mode, players will need to buy either the Pro set or attachable cymbals. Drums have always been the one instrument in Rock Band that's most like the real thing anyway, so for most players, the additional investment probably isn't worth it.

Things get interesting with the keyboards. The peripheral and game bundle costs around $150, which isn't cheap, especially given that a good number of songs in Rock Band 3 really don't make all that much use of synthesizers. In many songs, I found myself sitting idly by, waiting for my parts while other band members had all sorts of fun. (It makes you wonder why some bands had keyboardists in the first place.)

Still, when the keyboards are properly employed, you can rock out – to the extent that a keyboard player can do so. I had a blast with The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News – it's impossible to play keyboards for that song without happy memories of Back to the Future dancing through your head. There's also that same feeling of satisfaction when you finally get the hang of it, which harkens back to when you first learned how to wail on the plastic guitar.

Basic keyboard mode replicates the guitar experience, where only five colour-coded keys are used. I found this awkward, as I wasn't sure whether to use one hand or two, and I actually liked the Pro mode – which uses the whole keyboard – better since my hands were free to move around. And for those wondering: Yes, the keyboard does have a handle and a strap, so if you really want to, you can play it one-handed as a keytar.

Aside from the new instrument and Pro modes, Rock Band 3 features a redesigned interface and game modes, which add a few improvements here and there. Changing difficulty settings or swapping out instruments, for example, is much easier now.

What I like best about the Rock Band franchise is its amazing library of downloadable music. From death metal by the likes of Wings of Plague to Lady Gaga as performed by South Park's Cartman, the game caters to every musical taste. It's reasonable to expect, therefore, that Harmonix will be adding more keyboard friendly songs to its catalogue in the months to come. Can we hope for more Huey Lewis?

Rock Band 3 is in stores now.

Peter Nowak writes about technology for CBC News.