Today, my brother picked up a copy of the latest installment in the Rock Band series. Around the time this was rumored, I thought this was just a stupid joke cause the idea of mashing Lego up with Rock Band seemed too ridiculous to be true. Well, so much for that.
Unlike the other entries in the Rock Band and Guitar Hero series, Lego: Rock Band is clearly skewed towards the kids. While the core mechanics are the same, everything from the set list, to no-fail on all the time, to a "super easy" mode for all instruments aims to make this fun for the tykes and their parents.
As hardcore Rock Band junkies, we picked this up as a means of bolstering our Rock Band 2 set-list. Being able to export all the Lego: Rock Band songs is a great feature, because you might not always want to play "Fire" by Jimi Hendrix with Lego dudes all the time. There are some great songs in here, such as the aforementioned Hendrix track, two Queen songs and the Ghostbusters theme song. However, for every great recognizable song, there seems to be two mediocre tracks from no-name bands. Taste in music is subjective and maybe you'll get more mileage out of it than I will.
What is disappointing without question is what you can transfer over to Lego: Rock Band. Due to ESRB ratings, only songs that classify as E10+ from Rock Band 1 and DLC can carry over. For me, roughly half of my DLC carried over and less than half of the Rock Band 1 songs carried over as well. Currently, there's no way to import Rock Band 2 songs. Bummer.
The other major shortcoming to Lego: Rock Band is the lack of online functionality. I know that parents probably don't want their kids to play online with strangers, but that's something you could control without having to remove the option from the game completely for others. Also, the lack of leaderboards is just lazy. What would you have to lose from putting them in?
The game has a few other weird quirks, too. Load times are longer than in Rock Band 2, and for some reason the ability to hit the green button during save screens can lend itself to making annoying noises during a time of silence.
Even as a die-hard Rock Band fan, I have a hard time recommending this right now. The song list isn't as strong as it could have been and it lags behind Rock Band 2 in a number of key places. If you can pick it up on the cheap, it's a decent way to add a bunch of new songs to your Rock Band 2 stash. Otherwise, I'd pass.