Brutal Legend - Review
(for the Playstation 3)



I put aside my playthrough of the darkness to pick up this game (among some other great ones), a decision I fully stand by. After so much hype and setup for this game I couldn't ignore it. One of my colleagues is quite in fact the biggest fan of Tim Schafer the world has ever seen, and kept reminding me of the coming of "rocktober". ...So here we are.

I'm going to start by talking about the most talked about part of Brutal Legend from a critical standpoint. Eventually (about 1/4 of the way through, ish) the game turns into a makeshift RTS. You have a base, you manage resources, command troops. The difference is that your character has wings and flies around the battlefield allowing you to do this. At any point you can jump down into any part of the map and start fighting, playing songs to beef up your troops, and that sort of thing. Your character is the most powerful one so you joining the fight at the right time and place is really critical to the game's outcome.

It is a simplified RTS but I'm not sure why it's being knocked on so hard by so many people. It takes a different, neat approach to RTS style gameplay and keeps things accessible and fun, while still in the context of the game. It's definitely doing a lot more creative thinking with that genre than Starcraft 2 ever will. That said, that mode of play is quite competitive and has online VS and all that business, though it's not something I got that far into. Not that it's poorly constructed, it just wasn't quite my cup of tea. It's still a well-built multiplayer scene.

Most of the game revolves around the story, and it's awesome. Well, it plays out like every other wet dream that Jack Black tends to spew out into popular culture from the depths of his consciousness: there is a lot of rock everywhere, and he's at the center of his hellacious world being relatively awesome. In this case he begins as a lowly roadie who gets sucked into some other metal universe where he gets a hold of a gigantic axe and magical guitar that casts spells and that sort of thing, of course. You explore the world, do quests, level up your character and vehicles, and other RPG type things, though we are told that this is not in any way an RPG. Hmm. It also feels like an open-world game as you have quests and sidequests to discover as you zoom around in your homemade metal vehicle... thing. Which also shoots fire like almost everything else in this world.

Ozzie Osbourne shows up as the game's upgrade merchant. Lenny "Killmaster" Kilmister is a shaman of sorts. These appearances are both amazing and incredibly flabbergasting at the same time.

Things that the game have going for it are really stellar voice acting, vivid characters, funny interactions and plot, fun combat, and the satisfying RTS sections. It falls over on its quite bad SFX design (in places) and the difference between the combat, open world driving, and RTS feels sort of clunky. There's bits and pieces of each that aren't as well hashed out as they could have been, most probably because the game is doing so many things at once it can't possibly be super good at all of them.

It still comes together in a real satisfying way, though, and is most definitely worth checking out if you're into beat-em-ups or fighters, because one way or another, Eddie is always chopping away at demons in every facet of the game with a disproportionately large axe, which is the way it ought to be. Four stars.