Brutal Victory
Intro
Brutal Legends is the new game from the mind of Tim Schafer that stars Jack Black. This leads to two important questions, first, douse it live up to Tim Schafer's masterpiece Psychonauts? And Is this just another Tenacious D but in game form? the answer to both is no
Story
Eddie is the world's greatest roadie, and a lover of metal. Unfortunately he lives in the age of Linken Park and Beastie Boys. When a stage stunt goes wrong Eddie is crushed, some of his blood drips into his belt buckle transporting a giant demon to Eddie's world, and Eddie to a world that revolves around metal. There he he creates an army to fight the evil demon overload lord Tubuclous (probably spelled that wrong). A big part of Tim Schafer's games are the humor. This game has very little, it starts out with a lot of jokes, most of witch are funny, but about a hour in the story becomes a serious tale about a rebellion in a metal fantasy world.
Music
The music is all metal, no rap, fusion, punk, grunge, or alternative, and features a large variety, from popular among the main stream, Rob Zombie, DragonForce, and Ozzy Osborn to obscure names for metal fans like Anvil. The library is expertly used to give a unique cinematic experience for most of the games, and escaping a crumbling castle is a lot more epic with Through the Fire and Flames playing.
Two sides of the same game
There are two elements to this game, the action, hit things with your axe, and lightning from your guitar section, there there are RTS elements, actually it would probably be more accurate to say this is a RTS with action element.
Action
Action wise you have two weapons, an axe, and a guitar. The guitar allows you to cause earthquakes, shoot lightning, shoot fire, and in solo, melt enemies faces. and with the axe you can hit things. you can buy combos and weapon upgrades, witch will help, though the car upgrades don't really feel like they have any punch to them,
Solo
Solo's are a specials that by completing a simple timing minigame will allow you to a lot of things ranging from raise upgrade shops to melt enemies faces. Most likely you mill mostly use this is stage battles
Covered in metal god's love
To buy upgrades, you need to get flame salutes from the gods of metal, you do this my collecting things and completing missions. It's not very complicated we've seen it in a lot of other games.
Strategy
During the game you will encounter a lot of real time strategy events, during these you and your enemy will each be given a stage. you goal is to destroy the enemy's stage. to do this you'll need units, to get units you'll need fans. To get fans you have to find a fan geyser, make sure no enemies are near, and then play a solo to make a merch booth rise, this will channel fans to your stage. to create stronger units you'll need to upgrade the stage the stage has three upgrades. My biggest problem with the stage battles is the load feature witch severally limited how many units you can have out at a time. You can join in the fight if you want, but if you die, it will cost you fifty fans. along with that you can double team with all you units, this will either let you control them or do devastating team attacks.
Druid-plow
The Druid-plow is your car in the game. There's only one thing left to say about the car and that is that the game's system for leading you where you have to go sucks, it requires you to take time from focusing on surviving to look a the tail lights of the car to see where you have to go. Most of the time you will be better off just finding the big stage-light in the sky and making your way strait towards that.
In Conclusion
This probably won't appeal to fans of Tim Schafers games, but if your looking for an original game Brutal Legends certainly delivers.
4/5