Review: Brutal Legend

GAME: BRUTAL LEGEND
FORMAT: XBOX 360
DEVELOPER: DOUBLE FINE
PUBLISHER: EA

At a first glance, Brutal Legend may appear to be the bastard offspring of Guitar Hero and God of War, taking the heavy metal influences of Guitar Hero and blending it with the gory hack and slash third person adventure game styling of God of War. You could be forgiven for thinking that if you only played the first half an hour of the game, or made your way through the recently released demo. However, there is so much more to the game, including an expansive stylish open world, vehicular exploration, and large scale real time strategy battles. It certainly is an ambitious game, but it does not quite manage to successfully deliver on it’s potential, and is let down particularly by the inclusion of the numerous real time strategy sections.

You take control of Eddie Riggs, the world’s greatest roadie. After a freak accident on set, some of Eddie’s blood drips on to his belt buckle, which transports him to a freakish nightmare world full of druids, grotesque creatures, and mountains of skulls. Essentially this world is the basis of any Iron Maiden album cover. Not phased by this, Eddie quickly finds an Axe and is taken in by the human resistance, who are trying to free the land from the wicked Lord Doviculous. So far pretty generic sounding right? Where the game really succeeds is in it’s writing. While the story is fairly generic, the dialogue and interactions between the various characters are the real high spot of the game. Tim Schafer, the game’s writer/director, is on real form and demonstrates the same wit and charm he displayed in his previous games, such as The Secret Of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango. There are a number of celebrity voice cameos including Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy from Motorhead, both of whom do a particularly good job voicing their characters. Eddie Riggs is voiced by Mr Love Him or Hate Him Jack Black, and delivers a fairly subdued performance. Tim Curry provides the voice of Lord Doviculous and also delivers a low key performance, which is perhaps indicative of Tim Schafer’s vocal direction.

Any one that has played the demo will know how the game plays (check out our previous coverage of the game here for the introductions: http://newbreview.com/2009/09/21/preview-brutal-legend/ ). After learning the basics of combat, you learn that your guitar has special abilities. When standing in front of relics you can perform a guitar solo to learn spells and gain entry to the upgrade store. Any spell learned can be used at any time, by holding the right trigger and selecting the spell you wish to perform. You must then successfully press the required buttons in time to the music, Guitar Hero style. The on foot combat sections are probably the smallest aspect of the game. Once you build your car, and defeat the giant worm boss from the end of the demo, you are allowed to freely drive around the world looking for quests and collectables. There are a 140 stone dragon statues to be found, as well as a number of vistas which you activate by looking through a mounted pair of binoculars. As well as your main quest missions, there are the usual side missions you would expect to find in an open world game, including races, defensive, and offensive battles. While it is always nice to have plenty of content in a game, some of these mission types can quickly become tiresome. You can access the map by pressing the back button, and set a marker on your map with the A button. There is no in game mini map, instead you must look to the skies to see a pillar of light pointing down at your desired location.

Upon starting your quest, you are soon tasked with assembling an army, which involves rescuing the men of this world from enslavement in the mines, and the women from the pleasure towers. The men in this world all have massively thick necks due to their constant head banging in the mines, and while they show little sign of intelligence, they are your front lines of defence. Once you unlock the women, they are armed with guns and act as your long distance fighters. The problem I have with the single player is that it seems as if almost every level is designed as a training mission for the real time strategy based multiplayer. Each level has you unlocking a different type of soldier, and will require you to learn how to use them in combat. This would not be a problem if the strategy sections of the game were actually any fun. As you unlock more soldiers the controls become more and more complicated, and does not really seem to suit a controller as much as it would, say, a keyboard. In many cases I found that the result of the battle tended to be pretty random. In some cases if I went on a large offensive action I would utterly annihilate the enemy, and when attempting the same mission again, the same course of action led to entirely different disastrous results. This is the result of the intelligence of the AI, although I am not entirely sure if that is a good thing, or a bad thing. It can get quite frustrating when you issue an order and find that your soldiers are not doing what you demanded for whatever reason they may have. Often I found myself issuing an order, only to realise that I was a faction of a centimetre too far away for them to accurately hear my order. While you can give individual squads separate orders, you have to walk up to the squad, and hold Y, and then when they glow blue, issue their orders. It’s a little too much to demand of the player during the heat of battle.

The strategy sections of the game also spill over in to the competitive multiplayer. Although I have only played two games online, I can say that some of the frustrations of the single player sections are not so prevailent because the other players are experiencing the same difficulties that you are. There are three factions to choose from, Eddie’s team of metalers, Ophelia’s team of goths, and Lord Doviculous’ team of Clive Barker like gimps. The premise of the multiplayer, much like the single player, is to take control of fan geysers, which power your stage. The stage allows you to spend the points your earn from the fans on building up your army. The fewer geysers you have under your control, the fewer fans you have, and the longer it will take to manufacture more soldiers. Your soldiers are tasked with defending your geysers, and destroying your rival’s stage. In a three player game it is all against all, and in my experience I found that it was fairly easy to loose as there is often a lot going on on screen. My only real complaint about the multiplayer is that it is clearly the focus of this game, which has been billed as a single player experience. While we were all aware that there were strategy elements to the game, it was quite a surprise to find out how much of a focus point they were, especially considering how fundamentally flawed real time strategy games can be on game consoles. It is a brave move, but I feel it harms the overall experience of the game.

REVIEW ROUNDUP:

GRAPHICS: 4/5 There is a really strong aesthetic style to the game that will be particularly pleasing to fans of heavy metal. The characters has a suitably meaty look to them, but they are also fairly cartoonish. Sometimes, when driving around the world, items can pop up from out of nowhere, which is a little disappointing.

SOUND: 5/5 A surprisingly subtle performance by Jack Black, and a subdued one by Tim Curry. When those two actors were announced as the her and villain of the game I had feared that it would result in your typical over the top Jack Black character VS Dr Frankenfurter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show… Although on reflection that does sound like it has potential! There is an exceptionally good sound track if you are in to heavy metal, with a wide variety of songs, and the ability to skip a song with a simple button press is greatly appreciated.

GAMEPLAY: 3/5 There is a really wide variety of game types in Brutal Legend’s single player, although I wish to god that developers would stop including escort missions and time limited driving sections. The main focus of this game is the real time strategy aspect, which is by far the weakest aspect of the game, with overly complex and fiddly controls.

LONGEVITY: 3/5 The single player campaign will probably take about five hours to complete on the default difficulty, although there are dozens of side missions to beat, and a large number of collectables as well. While there is a fairly robust multiplayer, it is entirely based around the real time strategy sections of the game, so if you do not enjoy that aspect of the single player, then forget about the multiplayer.

OVERALL: 4 Head Bangs out of 5. Brutal Legend is a game that works at it’s best when it is at it’s most simple, the single player hack and slash sections of the game that dominate the first hour or so. It’s clear that Tim Schafer really wanted to take a stab at a multiplayer real time strategy game on the home consoles more than anything else. While he makes a worthy effort, the actual experience itself can be pretty frustrating, with complicated controls and a cluttered screen. I find myself wishing that they had instead focused on the hack slash/driving sections of the game over the strategy sections. While it is not a game for everyone, it is certainly a well crafted game.

[starreview tpl=16]

Tags: Brutal Legend, double fine, EA, Jack Black, Mightyles, real time strategy, Review, Tim Schafer, XBox 360

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