Rock Your Blocks Off

Two console game franchises expanded today with the release of Lego Rock Band. Depending on how you look at it, it's a "family friendly" incarnation of the music game... or a music-oriented entry in the fun and humorous Lego game series.

Though I have played a few of the Lego games, my perspective comes decidedly from the former point of view -- I remain a big Rock Band fan. From that stance, I regard Lego Rock Band as a mixed bag of some pretty major successes and some pretty incomprehensible shortcomings.

In the plus column is the set list. It's only 45 songs (odd, given the 80+ tracks in Rock Band 2), but song-for-song, I found it the best yet. It helps that the metal genre doesn't generally come off as "family friendly," so my least favorite category of music is excluded from the game. The songs skew rather heavily toward the current decade -- not always a plus -- but the game also boasts a lot of fondly remembered songs from when I was younger... and from earlier still.

There's Fire by Jimi Hendrix, Crocodile Rock by Elton John. There are 80s one hit wonders including Walking on Sunshine and Ghostbusters. A couple songs I always thought would be perfect for Rock Band, like Two Princes by The Spin Doctors and In Too Deep by Sum 41. (And indeed, they are fun in the game -- especially the former.)

But the big win is the whole flavor of the thing. The story mode of the game is just fantastic. You begin playing in a train station terminal, but soon build up to a wide variety of crazy challenges. You entertain a construction crew who enlists your help to rock a building down. You play a pirate ship, and then must fend off a giant octopus attack with your musical prowess. Songs are very appropriately matched to venues; you play Dig when you hit an underground area, Rooftops when you play on top of a skyscraper, and so on. And the environments all have lots of interactive elements. It's rather like the "dreamscapes" of The Beatles: Rock Band -- there are more fun things than ever here to just watch even when you're not playing the game.

Rather than scoring points, you're amassing "studs," the currency of all Lego games, to take back and spend not only on outfits and instruments for your characters, but a huge number of accessories to outfit the "Rock Den" where they hang out in between sets. You can even dress up your Band Manager and the members of the growing entourage you accumulate. Even though you have far less customizable character choices here than in regular Rock Band, it actually ends up feeling like a lot more because of all these fun side details.

But then come the down sides. First, the game does not support ANY form of online play. If you've made any online friends (and I've got dozens of regular Rock Band buds), you can never play Lego Rock Band together. I can't understand why a feature that works just fine in the other games was stripped out here. Doesn't "Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB" cover their asses for any creepy potty-mouths that the kids might find online? You can export the Lego Rock Band tracks to your hard drive to go back to Rock Band 2 and play them online -- but of course you lose the fun and whimsy of it all if you do that. (Not to mention that Harmonix wasn't ready with this export feature for PS3 on launch date. We have to actually wait until next week to do this.)

The other problem is that while Lego Rock Band can work with some DLC songs you may have bought in the past, it throws the "family friendly" blanket over that material too. Now, Lego Rock Band has an online store of its own, and I guess I can understand why it doesn't allow you to buy Sir Psycho Sexy by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But in my opinion, if you've already bought the song in regular Rock Band and put it on your hard drive, that's a tacit agreement that you're okay having that on the hard drive you might share with any children you have in your house. I say don't let players purchase "non-E rated" content through Lego Rock Band, but if it's already there by other means, let the game access it. My existing DLC library is nearly cut in half when I load up Lego Rock Band.

What I think it all means is that while I'm having a very fun time playing Lego Rock Band now, and think it's a load of laughs while I'm still playing through the story mode and don't know what comes next... I think it's probably going to wear out once that story is complete. Or maybe I'll be a bit of a trophy hound and hang with it until I've unlocked all of those. But after that, I'm not sure I see myself continuing to play it when I can't play online and can't access half the DLC I've spent money on.

So, overall, I think Lego Rock Band is a really great idea that was executed brilliantly from the story and flavor perspective, and badly bungled from the technical perspective. There are enough good songs in it (in my opinion) that I ultimately come down on the side of recommending it, but it's no replacement for Rock Band 2.