Reviews

The story is split across 9 chapters, following the band through their career. The first four are based around the band's "live" years, from the Cavern Club in Liverpool, through to the Budoken in Tokyo. The next three chapters are all set in Abbey Road, reflecting the period when the band gave up touring and retreated to the studio. Backdrops for these songs mix studio performance with fab, dream-scape animations, though sadly you might be too busy concentrating on the notes to truly appreciate these. The last chapter recreates the band's legendary final performance on the roof of Abbey Road, with an appropriate post-credits encore available to bring things to a close.

It's sometimes utterly amazing to think that all the songs you're playing are at least 40 years old, although their age can be reflected somewhat in their generally shorter length. To complete the Guitar career, with every song beaten first time takes somewhere in the region of 4-5 hours. This might not seem like much for a £40 (higher if you need instruments too) game, but take into account the replay value: four solo careers to complete, the multiplayer career (on or offline), and Chapter Challenges too, where you all the songs from a completed story chapter back-to-back (like mini versions of the Endless Setlist). Add in the wide variety of extra photos and videos you unlock, and the play time soon tallies up. Of course, to get the full benefit of this, you will have had to spend out a bit to have all the instruments.

"I wanna be your lover baby, I wanna be your man" said Thomas.

Another grievance relates to the integration of DLC. With so much planned for the game - three albums have been announced for the remainder of the year - it would have been nice for downloaded tracks to be playable in career. Sadly, these are merely restricted to the Quickplay modes, although you can now make a set-list of up to 6 songs in Quickplay, which has not previously been possible in Rock Band games.

The Beatles: Rock Band is clearly a labour of love, which deserves to achieve its aim of introducing the band to a whole new audience. Even existing fans have the potential to get something new from it, as performing on a single instrument gives you a greater appreciation as to the individual sounds each member of the band would create within the polished final product. Some might argue that it'll create more new fans of Rock Band than it does The Beatles themselves in the long term, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Perhaps we'll even get a few new Beatles tribute bands as a result of this. After all, with the demise of Oasis, we need a new high-profile one anyway!

Expect no lawsuits, the band are all here and playing their own songs.