Lego Rock Band

The Short


Pros
- Songs include Queen, Bon Jovi, David Bowie, and Elton John
- All family friendly songs: can play it with your kids without fear of "bad" lyrics
- Tons of stuff to unlock
- Your score = money, which is a brilliant idea and should have been done before
- Lego "Rock Events" where you play Ghostbusters to fight off ghosts, etc. are clever and fun
- Lego aesthetic makes up for a lot; even the notes are little Lego bricks
- Despite being a kids game, has some reasonably difficult songs when playing on expert
- "Kid-friendly" changes include a built-in no fail, auto-bass pedal drumming, and a "beginner" mode
- Unlocks carry across an entire gamertag rather than a single in-game character
- Entire soundtrack is exportable to other Rock Band games for $10

Cons
- Load times are unbelievably horrible, even with the game installed
- Song choices are all over the place, from "golden oldies" to modern pop tracks
- Only 45 songs on disc. Will load "kid-friendly" songs from your existing library, but that doesn't help much
- No particularly standout tracks, with even the two Queen songs (We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions) being poorly charted
- Came out after The Beatles: Rock Band but has no harmonies support
- Same old Rock Band experience with a new coat of paint; we've had two other games at this point that did the same thing
- Makes you replay the same songs multiple times for the career mode
- Songs are not unlocked from the start; you have to unlock them in career mode
- Turning setlists into "albums" that you can name and make covers for is cool, but having to play your album multiple times is dull and tedious

Lego David Bowie is pretty sweet. As is the fact instruments are color coded on the life bar

The Long


Lego Rock Band is a game that, unfortunately, came out at the wrong time without bringing enough to the table. Arriving after The Beatles: Rock Band there was literally no way it could compete with that game, especially considering it didn't upgrade with the harmonies introduced in that game. Next, it came out at the same time as Band Hero (Activision/Guitar Hero's similar answer to making their games more "kid friendly"), which was fronted by none other than flash-in-the-pan pop singer Taylor Swift. While the Lego brand certainly carried a good deal of weight (the Lego games based on movie titles are still, inexplicably, being made at a rapid rate), lack of innovation paired with a more-weird-than-wonderful setlist pretty much secured Lego Rock Band as the black sheep of the Rock Band family.

First off, the good. Lego Rock Band sticks to its Lego guns pretty closely, which is to say the aesthetic is charming and appealing. The "we have way more unlockable things than should be possible" that permeated the other Lego branded games is here in full force, and perhaps even more so. Hundreds of heads, bodies, hats, legs, and instruments are up for grabs, including stuff you can unlock for your "pad," a Lego house that serves as a sort of band main menu. You can install hot-tubs, buy pirate flags, and do all sorts of other junk. For kids, this will probably be a highlight. For a grown man, despite getting an secret amount of pleasure in setting a walrus loose in my house, it came off as lacking.

The game is pretty much Rock Band 2, but the notes are LEGO BRICKS. That's actually kind of awesome.

Luckily the unlocks come fast and furious. Cash in the game is given equal to your final score (with a few multipliers), meaning you will have quite a bit of money to spend once you beat the game. The fact you can create a princess zombie pirate with a beard and a double-necked guitar is pretty hilarious, and since unlocks are now tied to gamertag instead of each individual in-game character (thank goodness), you can make as many characters as you want with the crap you unlock. Guests can also use your characters, making this game much more accessible for party-play than its predecessors.

The "kiddying up" of the gameplay is evident here, though the actual note charting is still the same difficulty levels as other Rock Band games. Lego Rock Band has No-Fail mode (a bonus in Rock Band 2) on all the time, and if you die you simply take a point hit (which you can recover most of if you play the upcoming segments skillfully). This means you can keep going even if you suck, making the difficulty curve jump from Medium to Hard (which is still probably the biggest jump in the game) less arduous.

Also added is "Beginner" mode, which is a difficulty easier than "Easy." I use the word "difficulty" here lightly, seeing as for guitar parts you just have to strum any note with the on-screen ones, and hit any note for the drums. You can even have the bass pedal be "automatic," which I think some of my adult friends need in their Rock Band sometime. All in all, the game has options for kids, but still lets you play on Expert on difficult song if you are reaching for a challenge.

You can make some really weird dudes

The final standout is the "Power Battles," basically where a band takes turns to play specific parts of a song to complete an objective. As I said above, you play the Ghostbusters theme to rid a mansion of ghosts (seriously, this game has the Ghostbusters song in it), though it is probably the best fitting with regard to song-->objective. I don't get why Pink's So What is the song to thwart an orc siege on a medieval castle, but whatever...it's weird, but since it lets you switch off you get both a time to play and a time to watch the crazy shenanigans happening during the "battle," so it works. It also fits the lighthearted theme the Lego games strive for, which is awesome.

Is that Lego Rocker Jesus? Never mind, forget I asked. 

Unfortunately, the Lego aesthetic is really all this game has going for it. Underneath that pretty skin is still the exact same game we played in Rock Band 2, only with less features. You can't play online (probably since parents don't want their kids playing with strangers, but still...weird feature to take out), challenges are gone, and there are only 45 songs in the entire game. As an added bonus, this came out after The Beatles: Rock Band, which introduced one of the best things to the genre: harmonies. This game doesn't have any harmonies, which severely gimps those Queen songs.

The songs themselves are not only sparse, they seem to have no rhyme or reason as to why they were picked. Like Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, I swear they just grab-bagged as many popular songs as they could from across decades and threw them into the game, hoping it would cover everybody. Yeah, sure...I guess? Maybe that would have worked if it had more songs, but as it stands it's pretty much guaranteed that all of your friends will only find two or three songs they like (regardless of music preference), and then just go "eh" for the rest of them. Yeah, the Ghostbusters theme is hilarious, and Kung Fu Fighting is funny (though the guitar charting is a mess), but they are really just novelty songs. There is also no metal in this game, which means I hate it. Ok, not really, but the genre oversight is certainly noticeable. It does have country (finally), but it's Rascal Flats (aka the worse country band) so...yeah. And it's Life is a Highway (again, the most predictable choice) so...whatever.

Seeing the Rock Band 2 menues Lego-fied is pretty great, though

All this is also ruined by the fact that this game has the worst load times of any game I've ever played. I've heard Duke Nukem Forever is worse, but saying that game is worse than your game at something isn't much of a compliment. Installed to my Xbox 360's HDD it can take anywhere from 15-20 seconds to load a single song. Uninstalled was 30+. This is completely unacceptable; who failed to optimize this? We are already dealing with what is technically a sub-par Rock Band 2, now you gimp playability? Really bad form.

You can, however, export all the songs off the disc to be played in other Rock Band games, which I'd highly suggest doing. Since it's only $10 to export, that's less than a quarter a song, and even though the selection is weird the songs are fun to play. They did a good job with charting on (most) of the songs, making them party favorites. Besides, Ghostbusters. Come on.

Here's a Rock Band: Lego. Much better. 

Don't get me wrong: this is a good game for kids. It filters out your "profane" songs (though I still can't figure out why Green Day's Minority is an ok song while Boulevard of Broken Dreams isn't [if we are going by censored f-bomb counts, Minority easily wins]) and provides a simple shell for kids. The problem is that this all became completely obsolete when Rock Band 3 came out with the option to filter songs based on content rating, meaning you get the same filtering for your kids in a substantially better game. Yeah, they aren't Legos in Rock Band 3, but the aesthetic isn't worth all the problems Lego Rock Band has.

HOWEVER.

I still suggest getting it an exporting the songs, and if you have kids that are too young to enjoy Rock Band without the "Beginner" difficulty, this isn't a bad starting place. But if you are somebody who already knows how to play the plastic guitar games, you can pass on the experience and move on to the vastly superior...well, pretty much any Rock Band game except the first one.

So hit up the track list and decide if it's worth around $25, which is roughly the cost of the disc + an export. Again, it has a one-time use code built in like Rock Band 2, so you'll need to get it new in order to run the export. I think I got my money's worth (we got our copy free at Old Navy on some weird Black Friday promotion), but you can bet I dumped this game the minute I got Rock Band 3.

When it came out I gave it an amazon.com rating of four out of five, but again...this was before Rock Band 3 (or even Green Day: Rock Band). In its current state, I think two out of five is a fair rating.