Review: BrÜtal Legend (360)

Brutal Legend casts you as Eddie Riggs, played by like him or love him actor, Jack Black. The best Roadie in the heavy metal industry feels he was born in the wrong time, roadying about for the worlds worst “heavy metal” band. You’d be forgiven for thinking that an on stage accident which kills Eddie would be exactly what he needs, and in a way it is, as due to the accident he is transported back to ancient times where buildings were made out of swords and guitars, spiders spin guitar strings and heavy metal rules all. Unfortunately, humanity has no idea how to rock, so much so that demons have pretty much enslaved them, or caused others to sell out their fellow man. It’s up to Eddie to forge the weary resistance leaders into the ultimate heavy metal army, and take their show on the road, bringing peace and awesome music to the land.

Things start off well enough, with Eddie gaining a huge axe to decapitate people with, a magic guitar that electrifies and flambés his foes, and a sweet ride. Combat is hack and slash in nature and while we’ve seen better, it gets the job done. After the initial tutorial section (complete with hilarious prayer to the Lords of Evil) and meeting love interest Ophelia, Eddie is thrown into the sandbox world where he must find missions in order to save humanity. Or just drive around the beautiful world and listen to one of the best in game soundtracks ever. This is where Brütal Legend is at it’s best, driving around, head-banging to Accept’s “Fast as a Shark” or Mötley Crüe ’s “Dr. Feelgood,” racing against herds of beautifully vicious Raptor-Elks and Razorfire Boars, jumping over vast ravines, it’s just wonderful. While the graphics aren’t the best ever seen, they perfectly capture the feeling of driving through a set of album covers. The world that the game is set in and the characters you meet in it are some of the most memorable and well done in gaming memory. Helpfully exploring the world and doing things such as realising dragons from bondage (yes, that kind of bondage) and uncovering hidden relics nets you “fire tributes” which you can take to Ozzy Osbourne to upgrade your car, your guitar solo attacks, your axe and other items.  In a way it reminds of us of the Legend of Zelda games, with a hot rod instead of a horse and a far more interesting location.

Unfortunately, things start to unravel when you get into the meat of the game, the RTS sections. We don’t care what Tim Schaefer says, they ARE RTS sections. Basically, after the first few hack and slash  and driving missions, you’re stuck in a big field with a stage and fan geysers. Your stage is your bases, the fan geysers are your resources. You capture the geysers, use the fans to build/summon troops and upgrades, and then go beat the ever loving tar out of the bad guys who are doing the exact same thing. You have your melee units, your ranges units, your healers etc. In addition to order your troops around, you are on the ground in the battle as well, delivering orders “on the fly” (pun intended, you’ll see what we mean) while being able to get in to the thick of the action as well. We can see what Double Fine was trying to do, put you in a massive heavy metal battle of clashing steel and sound. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. The controls for issuing orders is frankly, a mess, giving orders to individual groups is ham fisted, especially considering you have to be standing next to a group to do it, so trying to do fancy flanking manoeuvres with multiple squads is a pain. That said those fancy strategies don’t work anyway, as the best way we found to win these stages is to basically capture a couple of geysers, build up you army and upgrade it to max, then just charge and lay in to the enemy in one massed attack. We’re starting to see the point of time claiming the game isn't a RTS, as the name implies using actual strategy.  The only real strategic element is when to build more troops or when you should use one of your guitar solos to either melt your enemies faces or drop the Hindenburg Zeppelin on their heads, which sounds awesome, and is, but gets dull after the tenth time.  These sections are the weakest of the game and unfortunately they make up at least half of the main seven to eight hour story.

The RTS sections also make up the games multiplayer mode, which doesn’t seem to have many players and works just about as well as the single player missions do (which isn’t very well), except when one player starts to get the upper hand it’s very hard for the underdog to get back into competition. Or maybe Gamestyle is just bad at it. We’ll stick to Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3, like everyone else will.

The rest of the story missions made up of more entertaining driving and hack and slash missions, such as beating up a giant chrome spider so you can take it’s guitar string webs to Lemmy Kilmeister of Motörhead fame, which are far more interesting than the RTS segments. The same can;t be said for the side missions though, which are incredibly repetitive. 90% of them are either am,bush missions, racing missions, or tower defences and they all play out in the exact same way. There’s only a few missions which differ from those and they aren’t that memorable. You’re not missing much by skipping most of the side missions and frankly there’s little incentive to go do them after the games completed unless y6ou really want the achievements

Brütal Legend is a great game to visit and experience but the gameplay doesn’t make us want to stay. A shame really as the game gets a lot of points for having an excellent world to inhabit and characters to interact with. It’s just a shame the actual gameplay and lack of re-playability doesn’t really elevate this much over a really good rental.

Rating: 7 / 10

Words by Garry Webber