For more on Rock Band Blitz, check out our full Rock Band Blitz review. Or, for more of the best Xbox 360 games for a 10 year old, why not try our Family Game Finder
Taking the Rock Band formula, but distilling it down into a bite-sized form, and removing the need for expensive plastic instruments, Rock Band Blitz is a high score based, point scoring game. Splitting each song into five tracks - one for each instrument - each containing just two possible notes, the goal here isn't to hit 100% of the notes, but rather, to spend your time wisely between each tracks, with the intent of maximising your combo, increasing your multiplier, and getting the highest score.
What Rock Band Blitz does require, then, is a large amount of manual dexterity. Your child will need quick fingers to switch between the tracks and mash the button in the right rhythms as the notes come down the screen. Although there's no difficulty level, which means you'll be bombarded by hundreds of notes, it's also impossible to fail - the design of the game basically requires you to miss loads of notes, meaning kids, no matter how good or bad they are, will be able to happily sit and mash buttons in time with the music.
However, the main problem here is that there's little here to keep children coming back. There's no local multiplayer mode, which is a little bit disappointing, and while children may happily spend a few minutes bashing out their favourite songs, unless they have several friends over Xbox Live who have the game, there's little reason to keep playing, as the main objective here is to simply beat your friend's high scores - if you don't have any friends with the game, then you can manage that pretty quickly. In fact, the only nod to a single player mode here comes courtesy of the "goals" system, which, as an example, asks you to earn 3 stars on a Rock song, or get 12 stars across any alternative tunes - but the goals aren't actually accessible in game. To browse, accept, or complete the goals, you have to access the separate Rock Band World Facebook app, which instantly rules out any children under 13, seeing as, per Facebook's official terms of use, you need to be 13 or older to hold an account. Of course, if your family has more than one Xbox Live Gold, or PSN account, it may be possible to get a family wide challenge going - but the distinct lack of any real single player progression means this could be a game your children abandon after a few goes.
Despite many of its songs featuring questionable lyrics, there's nothing for parents to worry about here - every swear word has been removed for the sake of the game. That said, there are plenty of songs that may deal with questionable subject matters, especially some of the tracks available as downloads, so parental guidance would be recommended. Sadly, there's no family friendly mode like in Rock Band 3, which automatically filtered out any songs that had any questionable lyrics - so it's up to parents to go through manually and decide what is and isn't suitable.
Age Ratings
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
