Psychonauts was my first experience with Tim Schafer and his creative development team at Double Fine. I loved the game for its hilarious story and creative game design. When it was revealed in 2007 that Schafer’s next masterpiece was going to be a metal-themed action game starring the voice and likeness of Jack Black, I was ecstatic. Two years and various publisher and logistical changes later, Brutal Legend has finally come to rock the Xbox 360 and PS3.

After turning on the game and being greeted by the “DOUBLE FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!” logo, you’ll witness a live action video of Jack Black entering a record store and searching around for a specific album that will “not only blow your mind, but also your soul.” It’s none other than Brutal Legend, which beautifully transitions to the game’s menu screen.

Once you start the game, you’re quickly introduced to Eddie Riggs (voiced by Jack Black), the world’s greatest roadie. Unfortunately, he works for a “modern-day” metal band that appears to be a parody of popular bands such as Fallout Boy and Linkin Park, which go on to prove that “real metal” in this day and age is dead. Eddie wishes he was born into a different age, “like the ‘70s—the early ‘70s.” His wish is granted when he is killed by a construction accident and is transported to a world of metal, complete with evil demons, mountains of skulls and characters donning S&M gear.

Eddie adapts to this new world painlessly as he almost immediately finds and wields a large battleaxe and discovers that his guitar, dubbed Clementine, is able to summon bolts of lightning and fire. Eventually, Eddie meets up with a group of humans and learns that a war between humans and demons has been waging for years. Eddie uses his advanced knowledge of heavy metal to aid the humans in their quest for freedom.



From the outset, the game appears to be a regular hack ‘n’ slash game, but players will eventually use the guitar to play brief solos that have various powers much like the ocarina from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. These powers range from a facemelter solo, which literally melts the faces off of a group of enemies, to summoning a burning (led) zeppelin to come careening down on your foes. One of the solos you’ll use most often is the ability to summon Eddie’s vehicle, the Druid Plow. The vehicle elements become another large part of the game as it transitions to an open-world game where you can take on dozens of side missions in addition to the main story missions.

Not much later, Eddie rounds up various troops including the melee-class Headbangers, the ranged Razor Girls, fire-breathing Metal Beasts, structure-destroying Roadies and many more. Eddie is able to command these troops to advance to different locations or to attack specific targets. This all leads up to the epic stage battles, which changes up the gameplay style once more to that of a real-time strategy game.

Your stage is your base of operations and your goal is to build up your units and destroy your opponent’s base. In order to accomplish this task, you must appease your fans by building merchandise booths and gaining their support. Your fans act as your resources for building and maintaining your army. However, your opponents will also seek these resources by attacking your merchandise booths and building their own, so you must defend your own resources while fighting for theirs. While this is going on, you’re still controlling Eddie like you do in normal play—often taking matters into your own hands.

Since the stage battles aren’t your typical mouse and keyboard RTS controls, nor is it your typical console RTS controls, you’ll find the controls and interfaces somewhat clunky. Your “cursor” is Eddie and you can only issue commands to units near you and your commands direct your units only so far, so you constantly have to issue new commands every couple of seconds as they advance forward. All of your unit creation tools are hidden under a submenu that can be brought up with the right-bumper. The stage battles wouldn’t be that bad if they weren’t a huge part of the game, but the latter half of the game solely consists of these battles.

The stage battles in the single player mode prepare you for the game’s multiplayer mode. Now, I’m not much of a competitive player and when I have a hard time playing a mandatory match against a computer opponent with awkward controls, what makes you think I’ll want to go out of my way to get humiliated by a human opponent? If you said achievements, you’d be right. In multiplayer, you play skirmishes with other players as one of the three factions that you meet in the game: The metal army, Ironheade (spelled with an ‘E’ to show they mean business), the emo army of Drowning Doom and the demon army of Tainted Coil.



The main problem with Brutal Legend is that it’s too ambitious with its game design. It’s part-action, part-rhythm, part-open world, part-RTS. With so many game varieties mashed up into one game, not all of them are fully developed. I would have preferred a straight third-person Zelda-style game, despite the combat being somewhat repetitive. I personally had major issues with the driving mechanic, specifically the escort and racing missions. When driving, if you happen to even slightly brush up against an obstacle, you’ll lose control of the vehicle and go flying off somewhere and experience difficulty recovering

More often than not, you’ll trudge through the tedious gameplay just to get to the next cinematic and hear the hilarious dialogue. Some of the quotes I’ve ripped straight from the game in this review already to give you an idea of the game’s humor. There are also tons of references and inside jokes to metal lore that I wasn’t too familiar with, but my metalhead roommates picked up on them.

Many fans were worried about the inclusion of Jack Black in the game. Love him or hate him, he manages to pull off the role and I don’t think anyone else could do the job better. Jack Black isn’t the only celebrity to offer their likeness to the game. Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister acts as the game’s shaman character known as the Killmaster. Ozzy Osbourne takes on the role of the game’s merchant and sells Eddie upgrades for his axe, guitar, and Druid Plow. Tim Curry voices the game’s primary antagonist, Emperor Doviculus, but he only appears in roughly three scenes in the whole game, which is disappointing.



Going along with the metal theme, Brutal Legend boasts more than 100 metal songs. I was never a metal fan prior to playing this game, but after completing it, I’ve warmed up a little to the genre. Some of the highlights for me were “Deadly Sinners” and “Destroy the Orcs” by 3 Inches of Blood and “Kickstart my Heart” by Motley Crue. The cool thing about the soundtrack is a specific song will play at a specific point in the game and it totally sets the mood for the current situation. The most epic moment in the game in my opinion is when you’re quickly escaping from a crumbling tower with burning debris crashing down on you and “Through the Fire and the Flames” by Dragonforce starts playing in the background. “HO-LY SHIT!” was what came to mind.

Graphically, the game looks great. It’s a bit more realistic than Schafer’s past titles, but it retains the animated movie appeal. Schafer has gone on the record saying that every scene from the game was designed to look like a metal album cover and it accomplishes this well. The animations look great and in combination with a stellar voice cast, this game really comes to life.

Tim Schafer has managed to create another hilariously awesome game with Brutal Legend. If you like humor, metal and/or video games, this is perfect for you. The game does try too hard to be so many game types at once and it definitely falters because of it. If you can endure the gameplay, it’s absolutely worth it for the story and dialogue.

3/5


Photo credit: Giantbomb.com