I’ve been playing Lego Rock Band off and on for well over a month, but with my newly repaired guitar I’ve been spending a lot more time with it.  As a long time Rock Band/Rock Band 2 player I am to the point where I play most songs on Expert Guitar except for the hardest tier and those I tend to play on Expert Bass. Going into Lego Rock Band I was expecting a lot of easy songs because the game is labeled as Family Friendly. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find a nice range of song difficulty in the included tracks.

The game’s family friendly aspect come in a couple other areas.  The first is in the song selection.  All of the songs have clean lyrics and would stay away from mature themes.  Yet, with songs from Blink-182, Sum 41, Kaiser Chiefs, and The All-American Rejects there are still a lot of familiar songs that are fun to play.  The other family friendly features are the Super Easy mode and the Auto Drum Bass. When you set it to Super Easy mode you just have to play along with the note’s rhythm but you can hit any color. The Auto Drum Bass cuts out arguably the hardest part of playing the drums by removing the need to use the foot pedal.

The developers have done a good job tying in a little story with the music.  Between sets you get some videos of your band’s adventures which are true to the humor of the previous Lego games.  You can still completely customize your band’s appearance as well as your Rock Den by spending the blocks you earned playing the songs.  Since you are a Lego character you can customize each piece of your character separately or complete swap him out for other themed characters you unlock.

I do have a couple small issues with the game.  The load times are pretty long.  Maybe it is because I have Rock Band 2 installed on my hard drive but not Lego Rock Band that is causing the load times to be so long, but it gets old.  Also, moving around to the different venue locations requires a small load when you switch to them.  I’m use to Rock band 2 where you can just jump from city to city without any loading.  The other annoyance is that most venues only have 2 or 3 songs from the game’s full set list and then the rest are Make Your Own and Mystery setlists.  Especially early in the game this leads to playing a lot of the same songs over and over as you work towards unlocking all of the game’s songs.

Overall, it is a really fun game with songs that play exactly like you would expect for a Rock Band game.  I like knowing that when I am playing a Mystery Set List I don’t have to worry that the songs it chooses will not be clean when my son is around.  Instead I can play and he can watch my Lego band rock. I also appreciate that the game uses Rock Band DLC but only the songs that are suitable for a game rated E10+. Right now my son is not quite old enough to play, even on Super Easy, but in a year or two I’m looking forward to playing Lego Rock Band with him. I think he will really enjoy starting our own band customizing his own rocker.