The playing field in Battle of the Bands is where the major similarities exist between these titles. Every match is a competition, where the band you've selected will face off against the CPU controlled opponent. On each side of the screen is a running board, similar to the guitar fret boards in Guitar Hero. However, since Battle of the Bands doesn't use an instrument style controller, all the "notes" are hit using the Wii remote. To simplify the controls, a motion of the controller, left, right, down, thrust, or a simple shake, hits every note. Battle of the Bands has a simple tutorial to explain the basic mechanics, and it's something you'll definitely need to check out before attempting to play the game.

Keeping with the theme of an actual "battle", when you manage to string together a series of notes you'll sometimes encounter an icon that will launch a special attack at your opponent. Some of these are pretty basic attacks designed to interrupt your opponent's own current combo, while others will burn away their score or simply alter the playing field a bit to make hitting notes much more difficult.

Also, when you select your band you'll notice they have a particular playing style, whether that is Rock, Country, High School Band and so on. This comes into play simply for the sound of whatever stage/song you select. For instance, if you pick the rock style band and square off against the Country band, and then select the arena that plays Blitzkrieg Bop, you'll notice the music switches styles between Rock and Country constantly. On some songs this works out pretty well, but on quite a few the different styles don't really mesh together well. Also, every song is a cover, and the vocals are all pretty substandard for each selection. However, the music selection is actually pretty decent, with a good variety of music styles and songs, including quite a few that haven't been covered to death between the other music titles out there.

The control system takes some getting used to, but actually works pretty well. I could see Battle of the Bands being much more fun to play with a group of people, like most Wii titles, but the single player campaign ends up being a bit short and easy, especially once you learn to balance your handling of the Wii remote. The only times I had real trouble hitting the notes would be when the right and left swings would come off really close to each other, but I chalked this down more to operator error than any actual fault of the game.

As a new music rhythm game, Battle of the Bands does a pretty good job of being something that would appeal to the casual market. It doesn't hold the same amount of complexity and difficulty needed to keep up with the current big titles, but definitely provides the younger crowd with a title they could keep up with, and obviously it should appeal to those that aren't willing to plop down $80 + for a game like Guitar Hero. Give it a rental if you're thinking about picking it up, and try to play together with someone else to see what you really think about this one.