School of Rock is a rhythm and music game published to support the Jack Black movie of the same name. The game is divided into several mini games, all of which are based on the music featured in the movie. The easiest game to approach is the School of Drums, which basically lets you tap out rhythm on two sets of drums. You’ll hear the tune going on and your tapping will coincide with the actual tune. Harder games include School of Keys (piano) and School of Guitar and Bass. Each mini game starts off with a simple tutorial. After you progress through the tutorial, you’ll face a series of tracks that increase in difficulty. Once you gain enough score, you’ll unlock other game modes.

As a rhythm game, School of Rock suffers from one big problem. It’s tied to whatever Paramount was able to license for the game and unfortunately, there just aren’t enough tracks to make the game fulfilling even for the $3.99 budget pricing. Most people will probably be familiar with Lynryd Sknryd’s Sweet Home Alabama but the other tunes are only average. And for some insane reason, I couldn’t get the iTunes integration to integrate the minigames with music on my iPhone/iPod. I thought that was the reason we were carrying this one universal device. More disappointing is the inability to expand the game to include more content. When you finish the game, that’s it, and you’ll have very little motivation to go through it again unless getting yet an even higher score is motivation enough for you.

My final verdict on School of Rock? Be a truant and just skip this class. There are better rhythm and music games out there for the iPhone and iPod Touch.