Brutal Legend Review
Brutal Legend is a tough game to classify into a genre. It’s an open world action game with elements o f real time strategy. It also doesn’t exactly implement these genres at the same time. You’ll drive around to missions, and the missions will generally either be a driving, hack and slash, or an RTS battle mission. Since there is less focus on each type of mission there isn’t a major amount of polish present, but the universe crafted for us by the legendary Tim Schafer and the folks at Double Fine is still one well worth visiting.
In typical Double Fine fashion, this game features a humorous storyline with enough heart and character development to make you genuinely care about what’s going on during the events of Brutal Legend. The cast is terrifically voiced by a huge list of both Hollywood and Heavy Metal celebrities, with no weak links whatsoever. Just to name a few you’ll hear Jack Black in the title role of Eddie Riggs, Ozzy Osbourne, and Tim Curry. I really enjoyed the story element, even if the humor is less prominent after the hilarious opening sequence.
As I mentioned earlier the game is sort of a mish-mash of different game styles. The game contains action and driving, but the main focus of the main story missions was the RTS element. What it reminded me most of was Dawn of War 2 multiplayer, since you don’t build a base. The base is ready to go, you just capture resources and build units all the while controlling your main character (during the story it will always be Eddie Riggs). I felt the RTS component was the most polished and most fun to play, but that may not be the case for everyone. RTS games still have issues on consoles due to the lack of mouse and keyboard, so it can feel quite overwhelming to manage building units, setting unit waypoints and combating other units. It can certainly take a while to get accustomed to the RTS component, but the game does a decent job slowly adding new units and abilities.
Outside of the main story missions there are tons of side quests and collectible type objectives to keep you busy but they are far to repetitive to be enjoyable. The side quests are particularly annoying, as there are tons of the same type of mission. You hear the same intro to the ambush missions way too much, and it just makes it worse to play the same thing over and over again. There is only a select few side quests that have a unique objective that are fun, but otherwise working to complete this game can be a major chore.
The soundtrack is pretty much completely compiled of heavy metal style music. If you don’t like heavy metal, you probably won’t enjoy any of the music. Though if you enjoy it, what is there is fantastic. There is about 100 songs, half of which need to be unlocked by raising buried metal in the open world, and when driving you can pick any song you want to listen to.
The art style chosen for Brutal Legend really suits the metal style, while still retaining that sort of cartoony humor they were going for. It also allows for a seamless open world with no load times with the exception of just before missions. The level of imagination with some of the cool landmarks throughout the game is really endearing had me stop to enjoy the scenery now and then.
A nice addition to Brutal Legend is the multiplayer. You can take what you learned from the RTS missions in the single player and take your skills online playing with three distinctly different groups. I found the different “races” to be incredibly balanced and it still retained the look, feel, and humor that I enjoyed from the single player experience. My biggest complaint with multiplayer is that it supports 4v4 matches, yet if you have no friends with the game your only option is 1v1. There is no matchmaking to find you team mates, and I personally would rather play with others than always 1 on 1.
The single player experience is a little on the short side (main story missions can be finished in about 5 hours, doing all the side stuff adds another 10 hours). The addition of the multiplayer really helps with the longevity of the game, as well as DLC (which so far has been primarily multiplayer focused). Though Brutal Legend did not exactly live up to the hype, we are presented with a fun, very playable funny game. I definitely recommend this as a rental, only worth buying if you like this style of RTS to get some value out of the multiplayer.