The Beatles Rock Band is not your father's Rock Band. Ok, well maybe, now that I think of it, that's exactly what it is. Gone are the avatars you are used to playing with and they've been replaced by those mop-headed British superstars, The Beatles! This is a completely different RockBand experience than you are used to, but it's a cool direction they've taken. By working very closely with Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono Lennon, the development team at Harmonix was able to create the ultimate experience for fans of The Beatles.

The look of The Beatles Rock Band is just perfect, taking the band members from their earliest gigs all the way through to their breakup, with their "look" changing as the years pass. The backgrounds that you see will mimic iconic gigs that The Beatles played like their first appearance at The Cavern and subsequent visit to Shea Stadium. Not only that, to express when The Beatles quit touring and became strictly a studio band, instead of simply seeing the studio surroundings and the band recording, you'll see fantastic backgrounds that complement the songs that are playing. During "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," you'll see psychedelic scenery and twinkling diamonds in the sky, naturally. "Yellow Submarine" and "Octupus's Garden" finds you swimming under the sea and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" finds the band in their classic military getups. All I can say is things here look really, really good. The boys look like they should and the places you play simply look right. Fans will be really impressed.

Now, as for the music, the only reason anyone would buy The Beatles Rock Band is because they are a fan of the band. Naturally, the first question on their lips will be "how is the music?" We are talking about a band that revolutionized rock music, after all. While some of the songs on this release are simply fantastic, others are very blah and I am surprised they were included. Songs like "A Hard Day's Night", "Can't Buy Me Love", "Revolution" and "Ticket to Ride" are obvious, but including stuff like "Boys" which is a cover they did of a tune from The Shirelles and "Dig a Pony" were just painful to sing. Really weird and obvious omissions are "Help!", "Long and Winding Road" and "Jude" for crying out loud. I can only guess they are saving those for DLC or a second release? At the time of this writing, only "All You Need is Love" was available to download.

Gameplay in The Beatles Rock Band is pretty similar to past RockBand releases, although there have been a few improvements and one radical change. For starters, now you can have a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer and up to three singers! Yes, The Beatles' famous 3-part harmony is alive and well in this incarnation of Rock Band. The cool part is that if a singer slips from a harmony to the lead, it's fine and dandy and there are no penalties involved. Basically, hitting the correct pitch for the harmonies just helps to build those meters up, but if everyone is singing lead, it just builds the lead's Star Power (now called Beatlemania) up that much faster. I can see this title being a huge hit at family gatherings over the holidays where parents might want to get in on a little Beatles action, but would be afraid of being penalized by the game. In fact, on the Easy setting, you are automatically in No-Fail Mode, so it's all just fun.

If you need to brush up on your skills, there are Tutorials and a Practice mode, with specific attention being paid to letting you practice the harmonies. If you want to see The Beatles' career from start to finish, you can select Story mode. You'll perform in the places that The Beatles performed such as The Cavern (where they got their start), Shea Stadium, Abbey Road Studios and finally on the rooftop of Apple Records. 4-5 songs will be available for you to sing in each Chapter and you can't progress to open new songs until you complete these songs. I would have preferred a way to open the various Chapters without doing every song, since there were a few I really didn't like, especially towards the end, but that's ok. By getting the full 5 stars on songs, you'll unlock Photos that come complete with cool tidbits of The Beatles' trivia. Also, any CG videos that you unlock during your progression through the Story mode will be available for your later viewing in the Theatre. You can even listen to archival studio or performance chatter while your song is loading. Very cool. Once you complete a Chapter, the Chapter Challenge for that area becomes available. This is where you have to play each song in a Chapter, in a row. Getting all 5 stars on every song here nets you another photo and helps you get one step closer to completing the game to unlock a further secret. Of course, you can play a single instrument or as a soloist, or as a full band or anywhere in between.

For those not interested in working through the Story, you can just jump right in with all of the songs available to you in Quickplay mode. The coolest thing here is that players can jump in and out and when they leave, they'll be replaced by A.I., so it's pretty seamless. You can either play locally or on Xbox Live, as you can with the Story mode as well. Of course, there are also Achievements that you can collect, scads and scads of them, as well as download additional songs via Xbox Live. But don't look for your previosuly downloaded songs to be available here. This is all Beatles, all the time.

Although I am not much of an online gamer, I did try out The Beatles Rock Band online via Quickplay and was able to connect pretty easily with a group of other players. While the experience wasn't stellar, I didn't experience any hiccups with my connection. However, when I tried to hook up with a friend online, it didn't work at all. StarScream and I tried unsuccessfully for quite some time to invite each other both to games and/or parties so we could play together and each time, we got an error saying the invitation may have expired. This really sucked since I would have preferred to play with a friend than strangers. StarScream was able to connect with friends earlier in the day, and I could clearly connect with others (not friends, however), so maybe it was just an issue at the time we tried it.

Well, the Story mode in The Beatles Rock Band can be completed in about 5 hours, so we aren't talking about an insane difficulty here. As far as each song goes, you can select to play on Easy, Medium, Hard or Expert and each band member can choose their own difficulty level. Furthermore, you can swap up your difficulty for every song, so it's ultimately configurable. The higher the difficulty, the more points you can earn, but if you just want to get through the songs quickly, you can go with an easier setting. As I mentioned earlier, by setting it to Easy, you can play in the No-Fail mode and you can't lose, so that's cool for people who don't want the pressure of possibly failing.

Sing into a mic, strum a guitar/bass and beat those drums. It's pretty basic stuff for The Beatles Rock Band. As you sing and/or play the instruments, you'll strive to hit the correct pitch and to press the appropriate buttons, etc. to earn points. Each singer or instrument has their own meter so they can build up Beatlemania (Star Power in other Roc kBand games). When you enter Beatlemania, not only do you activate the (up to) 8x multiplier for maximum points, but you can also use it to save a bandmate who is having problems. When one band member enters Beatlemania and starts getting mad, crazy points, everyone gets extra points.

When singing in 3-part harmony, you'll see three bars in blue, light brown and dark brown. The lead singer follows the blue pitch line, while the two harmonies follow the brown lines. Again, if you are trying to sing a harmony and slip into the lead vocals, its fine and you don't get penalized at all. At one point, there were three of us singing to try out the 3-part harmony and JR Nip had to leave for a bit. Instead of letting the mic sit dormant (which again, won't penalize you at all), I picked it up and decided to sing the lead into both mics. Imagine my surprise when I regularly registered on both the lead and the harmonies. It was interesting. The reason it is important for band members to sing the 3-part harmony is to earn Double Fabs and Triple Fabs when everyone strikes the right chord at the same time. More points, of course.

There's a lot to say about The Beatles Rock Band, but the truth is, if you are a fan of The Beatles, you just need to play it for yourself. While Geck0 did say at one point, "Okay, this is too much of The Beatles," if you like their music, you'll have a really fun time with a good part of this game. Between the psychedelic scenes and truly fantastic CG videos, the bits of trivia and the absolute authenticity of the entire project, not to mention being able to sing and play classic Beatles' songs, it's a dream come true. It's clear the developers had a great time making this game and it shows through in the completed project. Sure, I am missing some songs that weren't included here and I didn't like all of the tunes available, but that just means that they'll be making gobs of money off of me in DLC.