Rhythm gameplay is a major play component. Oddly enough, it's also the game's shakiest feature. It's not that it doesn't work, but there's little room for mistakes. If you look at other rhythm games, there's a slight bit of delay between when you're supposed to hit the button and when you actually hit it.
Disney's Camp Rock: The Final Jam offers, as far as I could tell, little room between the two actions.
The worst offender is the guitar. The actual mechanic is neat - strum with the stylus and play chords by pressing directions on the D-pad. However, with the exception of the tutorial, I was never able to get the game to read my strums. Or rather, it would read the strums, make the noise, but not give me credit for it. I won't call the mechanic broken; it's just incredibly strict about what it will accept as a correct hit. After a few failures on the first song, I ended up giving up the instrument entirely.
Drumming is slightly better, though not by much. Tapping the drums in time with the falling orbs is easy enough. Yet, what you're tapping out doesn't always match what's going on in the song. At one point, I heard a constant beat on the cymbal, but ended up hitting a non-existent (or, at the very least non-audible) snare part. Dancing suffers from the same issue; hitting moves is easy, though it doesn't always match the tempo/ timing you want to follow based on the music.
Bass is the only play mechanic that feels right. It's sort of a hybrid of the drums and guitar. You hit marks as they fall from the top of the screen, but also press corresponding directions on the D-pad. Even the rhythm feels right, making it the best of the bunch and the one I stuck with the most.
If it wasn't for the problems arising from a set of busted mechanics, Camp Rock: The Final Jam would top the "Great Game for Kids" category. As it stands, it's an okay game that will appeal to fans of the movie and no one else.
