Lego Rock Band Review

Lego Rock Band - 2 out of 4 Stars

It's a shame when two big franchises come together, only to produce a product that fails to reach the height of either individual property.

At its core, Lego Rock Band performs as a solid Rock Band product. All the fundamentals are there, and aside from the art direction, the game is essentially a large Rock Band 2 track pack. However, there are a few new additions to the familiar gameplay.

Most notably, as you progress through Career mode, your band is given a series of special Rock Power Challenges along the way. During these events, you do not get the benefit of your "overdrive" meter. Performing well arbitrarily lets you meet some sort of goal, such as defeating a giant octopus, or demolishing a building. But the effort put into programming these spectacles are all but wasted, as you are concentrating too much on the stream of notes watch the action directly. It's like games that hide big flashy CGI sequences behind Quick-Time Events. Seeing things in your peripheral vision doesn't cut it.
The game designers tried to fix this in co-op mode, by having only some band members play at a time during these challenges, while others are given a break… to watch the action I guess? But this feels quite awkward, especially if you're singing. And you'll probably be too busy watching for your cue to rejoin to actually enjoy the scene on display.

Also new to the gameplay, is the chance to save yourself from failing out of a song. If you miss too many notes, instead of stopping the song, you get a "stud recovery" chance which allows you to re-enter the game if you are able to play a small section with a high enough accuracy. It's a nice feature, that might encourage newer players not to give up on the game.

Lego Rock Band also introduces cutscenes to career mode. Guitar Hero games have had brief cartoony scenes, but LRB actually uses your created characters (customizable band members and road crew) in scenes about goofing around or living the Rock Star life. Some of these are really enjoyable, but made me wish they were instead in a proper Rock Band game with more realistic and expressive characters (which finally happened in Rock Band 3, though to a lesser extent).

Which brings me to what I find as the biggest fault of the game: the limitation of the Lego characters. Especially early on, the options for character creation are terribly light. It seems designed for you to want to have weird abominations as your rock avatars. You can't even change color of clothes or skin tone to match properly. You're often stuck with using pre-created characters because it's a bother to find a good torso that matches the skin color of your chosen head.
The allure of the Lego games, for the most part, is seeing famous people and characters in Lego form. Other than a few rock star recreations, that doesn't happen here. You're not even given enough pieces to build yourself with any accuracy. You can simply rearrange a small number of features from unlocked character models.
And the physical limitation of the Lego movements sap the enjoyment out of watching them perform. While it can be charming to see their pivoting dance moves, it grows old quick. And there is never a point in the game where you have direct control over them, unlike in the other Lego games where you can just enjoy playing with their animations.

Another negative aspect of this game is the hinderance of its E10 rating. Any song you've downloaded from the Rock Band Music Store that carries a more mature rating will not show up in Lego Rock Band's song selection. I can appreciate the developers wanting to keep this game as kid-friendly as possible, but I would have preferred that they found a way to use the console's parental controls to restrict the track list of underage players rather than deny everyone access to their songs.

Overall, it is a decent, but limiting game with a big soundtrack. It's best used simply as a track pack for other Rock Band games.

Recommended for: Rock Band enthusiasts wanting to extend their track library.