he Battle of the Bands’ song list is a mixed bag, but that’s okay because you spend most of your time remixing each one with the game’s five musical styles: rock, country, hip-hop, Latin, and marching band. You might even find that you enjoy some of these songs more after they’ve gone through this Frankenstein mash-up. For a guy like me who enjoys a diverse number of musical styles, giving a country twang to Soundgarden’s “Spoonman” or throwing a hip-hop beat over Korn’s “Coming Undone” is the game’s shining achievement.

Tragically, my praise for Battle of the Bands stops there. Gameplay is simple. Gems scroll up from the bottom of the screen and you’ll match the song’s beat to motions of the Wii remote. Music games tend to require a higher level of precision than most other games, but the motion-based gameplay, feels devoid of skill. For the most part, you’re waving the remote in one of three different directions: left, right, or down. And that’s it. You don’t build up a combo score for accuracy or gain any power-ups that dramatically affect your score. If fact, you probably won’t care what your score is as long as you beat your opponent, so there isn’t much incentive for replaying songs.

Since Battle of the Bands is structured like a fighting game, you’re always battling someone. If you’re not playing with a friend, the game’s AI can be very inconsistent. The combat system is too limited to make you feel like you’re actually fighting anything, and the block mechanic is poorly implemented. Some of the more powerful weapons don’t even seem to affect the AI’s performance.

I haven’t laughed this much while playing a game since I was making fun of Donkey Kong Barrel Blast, but Battle of the Bands’ one great idea would have benefited from some more robust gameplay. As it stands, it’s little more than an amusing party game that you’ll pop in only when you and your friends are between sets of Rock Band.