A New Age of Metal!
It is the age of metal ladies and gentleman! Brutal Legend is here and it makes a fine addition to this Fall’s epic game lineup. Head-splitting metal music, funny witty dialogue, and fantastic creative landscaping makes Brutal Legend not just fun to play, but fun to look at and enjoy as a complete package.
Let’s start with story and characters; Brutal Legend has a great story and fantastic characters. Eddie Riggs voiced by Jack Black is phenomenal; Killmaster voiced by Lemmy, Doviculus voiced by Tim Curry and The Baron voiced by Rob Halford are also great as supporting characters. The story is about Eddie Riggs, a heavy metal roadie. who is transported to a world of metal by getting into a accident onstage and blood tainting the metal god belt buckle that belonged to his father who served as a hero in the metal world long ago. Later he finds out he is the son of a demon queen and a regular human, knowing this, he uses his power to free a group of oppressed rockers from General Lionwhyte and Doviculus from the Tainted Coil. There is also a love story between Eddie and Ophelia, who later becomes leader of The Drowning Doom. The story is a little thin in some parts, but the characters do a great job of carrying the stories and I can just watch the in-game characters chat it up with humorist dialogue for hours-it’s as good as an Adult Swim cartoon.
Gameplay is a mixed bag. Many critics like the Real Time Strategy mixed in there and some don’t. Originally, most people believed that the game was just a third-person hack-n-slash God of War clone, but later found out that the game has open world and RTS portions. I enjoyed all parts, the hack-n-slash parts are fun because you wield and axe and guitar and can mix up combos, the open world is fun to explore because the environments are so pretty and to-scale, and the RTS is lite enough for consoles. Compared to Halo Wars, Brutal Legend is super simplistic; only using Eddie, Ophelia or Doviculus to control near twenty units and only protecting economy points (fan geysers) and a main stage. Each team, Ironheade controlled by Eddie, The Drowning Doom controlled by Ophelia and The Tainted Coil controlled by Doviculus can be played online, but only Ironheade is played in the single campaign. Speaking of the campaign, it runs for about ten to twelve hours and serves as the story of Eddie and a tutorial for online RTS play.
So to wrap-up, Brutal Legends is a varied, fantastic game with a powerful soundtrack (107 heavy metal tracks) that is easy to play and fun to watch. I recommend this game and hope this might get people into heavy metal music.
