Pros: Usual fun Rock Band gameplay.
Cons: Dull presentation, lesser arrangements.
I met a girl, an Industrial Design student who was working on a toilet mock up for some class, who told me she loved Legos. When I told her there was a new game called Lego Rock Band, she said, “oh cool, can you like, build your own guitar controller out of Legos?” I also mentioned the game to a guy who said, “what, do you put Legos together with music or something?”
Apparently you can’t hear of this game without thinking of more interesting gameplay than the designers came up with. Lego Rock Band is nothing more elaborate than a game in the Rock Band series in which your band’s onscreen avatars are little Lego people.
Gameplay and Presentation: About What You'd Expect
The Game delivers the basic Rock Band experience. You have a bunch of songs (in this case, Two Princes, Kung Fu Fighting, We Will Rock You and more) that play while onscreen indicators tell you when to press buttons on your guitar controller or bang on your drum controller or sing into your microphone.
There are just a few things that relate to the Lego theme. For example, the musician avatars are little Lego guys and gals and the onscreen indicator looks like it has Legos on it.
The game also has various Lego-related text on the loading screen, ranging from trivia (“Lego is sold in more than 130 countries.”) to oddball descriptions of the adventures of Lego characters (“In order to fulfill his royal destiny, King William had to pry apart two Lego bricks that had been stuck together for centuries”) to non sequitors (“No dinosaurs were harmed in the making of this game”). These little blurbs are so odd, pointless and occasionally ungrammatical (as in one that begins, “Lego produce 564 bricks a second …” that one imagines the designers simply got really stoned one night, wrote whatever popped into their head and never looked at this text again.
The Experience: Just Okay
I probably wouldn’t spend so much time talking about the loading screen text if there were anything else to talk about, but Lego Rock Band just doesn’t have a lot going for it. Many of the songs feel too pop-driven to work as well as the rock songs typically used in the series and many of the arrangements feel uninspired (although Ghostbusters was surprisingly successful). I played the game with my friends David, Francis and Tim (who is so good at drums that he should really stop playing Rock Band and just invest in a drum kit), and I guess we all had some fun, but no one oohed and aahed as people had when they came over for The Beatles: Rock Band.
Conclusion: Not the Best of the Series, but Perfectly Acceptable
Lego Rock Band feels like a profoundly unnecessary game: a half-hearted rhythm game tossed together to take advantage of the popularity of Lego-branded family-friendly video games. It’s not a bad game, and you can still have some fun playing it, but it’s a bad sign when the game’s designers come up with less interesting ideas than some girl taking a class on toilet design.
