I wanted this to be good and I’m pretty sure most of the other people who were checking out the preview material were wishing for the same thing. Take Tim Schafer, he of Monkey Island and Psychonauts fame, let him loose on a world made up of heavy metal album covers and you have the beginnings of something wonderful. Schafer is one of those rare people in video games in that he’s a member of that small band of people who can put their own ideas forward in a game, who are kind of alongside movie directors in the regard of authorship. He has a habit of creating memorable characters and dialogue. It’s a small shame that such things, although welcome, sometimes overtake the actual need for gameplay.
Brutal Legend is a real time strategy game with bells on, not that you would have had any clue about this from any preview you may have seen. The game starts out as an open world adventure in which Jack Black plays the role he’s famous for in movies (ie- rock obsessed male with dubious intellect) finding himself sucked into another world where the sound of metal music can generate lightning bolts from the sky and fire from the hands of those who play. One thing you can’t fault Brutal Legend on is presentation, the thing looks amazing and the game world is really well realised. Great stone guitars jut out from the ground, amps form cliff faces and metallic beasts roam the mountains. In this sense the game displays imagination by the tour bus load and it’s something that occurs in all of Tim Schafer’s games in the past. Even though this is a complete flight of fantasy it still manages to draw you in.
So you’ll do the first few tutorial missions, you’ll have started to use your guitar and axe as a weapon, played a few power chords to cause earthquakes and driven around in a makeshift vehicle called The Deuce. You’ll have met characters which are both interesting and funny and you’ll be all set to hack and slash your way through the map. Brutal Legend then decides to throw you a complete curve ball about an hour in by making you take charge of troops and regiments across a battlefield. Each side has a stage at one end of the level and the idea is to get enough resources together by attracting increasing numbers of fans to enable you to storm your opponent’s performance. Each army is defined by whatever genre of metal they listen to so whilst Goths will have ghost like troopers dressed in black the industrial metal fans will look like they’ve just walked out of the S&M club. This sounds really good in theory and it does supply a nice twist on the usual RTS mechanic of shoving tanks around but there are small details that ruin it a little.
In the first couple of battle sequences you’re placed against forces with the same style of units as you have. Whilst this is obviously to make sure you’re in an even fight when you learn the ropes you’ll soon find that it becomes really hard to tell who your guys are and who is the enemy. They’re usually separated by some kind of artistic detail such as having long blonde hair but this is really hard to see when you’re a mile away. Often I’d find myself ordering my own troops to slaughter a unit that was on my side. Just a small notifier of ‘enemies this way’ would have made things so much easier.
Brutal Legend also wants to be a sandbox game allowing you to drive across the terrain in order to find missions but whilst other games might encourage this by letting you off the hook every so often Brutal Legend’s story seems to want to pin you down. At one point a member of your team has been injured and needs help from a local healer who is rather usefully living at the top of a large mountain. You arrive at the bottom to see the half dead trooper being carried and you are asked if you want to do the mission now or do you want to fart around a bit beforehand. It’s a bit like being in St John’s Ambulance service and having a cup of tea before attending a cardiac arrest.
Exploration is a source of frustration also. You can get around easily in The Deuce but if you should as much end up driving off a cliff edge (which is easier to do than you think) you’ll die instantly and have to restart right back from wherever on the map you started. It’s often teeth gnashingly irritating but often more so if you’ve driven for absolute miles to get there. There’s also no visible HUD so you can never tell how much energy you’ve got in the heat of battle. The screen edges will turn red, the heart beat sound effect will get louder, your character will slow down and you’ll be jumped by something spiky and die. The first boss did my head in because of this.
Tim Schafer also appears to have made this game as a way of getting to meet his heroes and sure enough there are a fair few metal gods who have put their dulcet tones forward for the game. Lemmy appears early on, as do Rob Halford and Ozzy Osbourne and all of them do seem to at least make the effort. Jack Black is also quite good as Eddie Riggs but to be honest you’ll probably tire of his constant whitterings in short time. It’s not that he’s unfunny, it’s just the fact you’ll have seen this character in all his movies before. High Fidelity, School of Rock, The Pick of Destiny, the list carries on. The fact that there’s an intro video of him finding the Brutal Legend record at the start of the game which is unskippable and goes on for a good three minutes every time you start the game only adds to him getting very tiring very quickly.
It sounds like I hate Brutal Legend, the truth is I don’t but it looks a whole lot like it’s committed one of the worst crimes in gaming. This is a game that should have been brilliant because there’s obviously a whole lot of love gone into this. Care has been taken to make this memorable and a cut above some generic adventure games that flood the shelves. Sadly, somewhere along the way, the developers started to get so self absorbed they forgot they were making a game and instead came up with an animated movie with playable bits in. Brutal Legend’s gameplay niggles are small in size but massive in number and therefore contribute to some areas of the game being stunning whilst others fall flat straight away. Brutal Legend is like the band that sounds amazing on the radio but turn out to be a heap of rubbish when you see them live.
