Brutal Legend

A long time ago, at a game publishing house far far away, worked an up’n’coming staff member named Tim Schafffer. As the years go by, the list of his credits grow to include now classic video games such as MANIAC MANSION, TALES OF MONKEY ISLAND, FULL THROTTLE, GRIM FANDANGO and PSYCHONAUTS. While not all of these were blockbuster hits, they remain in the hearts of video gaming geeks to this day. Now with his own game studio called DOUBLE FINE PRODUCTIONS, Mr. schafer takes: a huge cast of actors and musicians, a soundtrack that will please anyone even slightly interested in heavy metal music, and a comedic storyline with a subplot on the supernatural origins of heavy metal. But is it good?

The story starts off with our hero, Eddie Riggs (voiced by Jack Black), a roadie for a douchey pop rock band, that ends up risking his life in the name of roadie duty. After saving the band members from certain death, something happens and he’s transported to world that looks like every heavy metal album cover you’ve known and loved. Upon his arrival he quickly find out about the evil ruler of this world, Doviculus (voiced by Tim Curry). As the story progresses you meet characters voiced by Rob Halford (lead singer of Judas Preist), Lemmy Kilmister (lead singer and bassist for Motorhead), Lita Ford (singer and lead guitarist for The Runaways [biopic due out in April 2010]) and of course Ozzy Osbourne (lead singer of Black Sabbath and widely thought of as ‘The Godfather of Heavy Metal’. Through the game you travel through different lands based on the different genres of ‘metal’ (including glam metal). As video game veterans know, Mr. schafer has a history of games with comedic dialogue. Even though I’m not a big fan of Jack Black, it still managed to make me laugh numerous times.

At 2009’s E3 expo, BRUTAL LEGEND was shown off, but most of the public found out about it via it’s trailer (shown below). From the trailer, it’s looks really funny, has great visuals but it wasn’t 100% clear on the how the game played. It looked like it was a hack’n’slash through a demon realm of heavy metal, however a major part of the game wasn’t really publicized in the trailer.

What isn’t really shown much in the trailer, is that most of the game’s storyline battles are done in a Real Time Strategy (RTS) style. Just to name a few of your units: your grunts are headbangers, your missile attack style attackers are chicks with heavy metal cannons, and your healers are bassists on motorcycles with huge speakers that sooth your battle wounds. As you get more through the story, you get more new and interesting units.

The underlying two issues with the game are somewhat subjective. First, the fact that the RTS portion of the game wasn’t widely publicized, somewhat annoyed consumers that bought a game they thought was a hack’n’slash. The second issue, is that while the RTS portion is well designed, it slows the game down to a halt. With RTS games, in harder levels, you tend to have to discover (usually by a lot of trial and error) the exact strategy the game developer/programmer had in mind. With not much margin of error, the player is highly bound to get super frustrated by what seems like a flawless victory by the computer. While it may need to be noted, that this reviewer tends to start new playing games on the hardest difficulty, this issue is very common in RTS style games.

Between story points and their associated battles, you mostly have free reign to wander the land. Luckily, early in the game you get a hot rod car that makes travel a lot easier. As you do various side missions you earn “tributes to the fire gods” (a cigarette lighter icon) that you can use to upgrade things like your abilities, your car’s abilities and various non-useful things.

Overall, the game is designed pretty well, but a number of minor things prevents it from giving it a glowing score. Among the issues mentioned earlier, a mild annoyance is the amount of repetion with some of the vocal work. A majority of the side missions intro with one of maybe three quick scenes that you easily get tired of hearing. What is surprising is that every time I visited Ozzy, he never repeated a welcome line. Why couldn’t they do that for characters they knew would show up a lot more than Ozzy.

The game also has a multiplayer aspect to it , but it’s simply an online versus mode for the RTS portion of the game.

The soundtrack is a huge….HUGE success of this game. While I only have a passing appreciation for heavy metal, I found myself discovering classic heavy metal I’d been only vaguely familiar with. With a total of 107 tracks from roughly 75 bands, each one personally picked out by schafer himself, it definitely will please heavy metal fans as well as make new fans of metal.

With some of my fellow Geeks carrying feelings of annoyance and betrayal of the game, it must be said that they stopped playing when the RTS came into play. I, on the other hand, completed the game’s story mode. Yes, the RTS parts were a big suprise. Yes, the RTS portion brings the story to a grinding halt. And yes, there are some annoying technical issues. However, the GIGANTIC soundtrack and the comedy of Mr. Tim Schafer makes up for some that. I’d recommend it to a friend, but I’d warn them about the Real Time Strategy ahead of time.