Ever since I heard that Tim Schafer was making a game after Psychonauts I couldn't wait.  I loved the old Lucas Arts games, especially the ones Schafer was involved in.  I loved Psychonauts, and was bummed how poorly it did in retail.  Thus when I heard of the concept of Brutal Legend, I thought "genius!!!  Time Schafer has done it once again!!!"  I am still a Jack Black fan (especially the Tenacious D persona) and all the videos made the game look totally bad-assed.  I even thought the demo was brilliant-with a good blend of story, humor, graphics, character design and gameplay.   
  
Unfortunately, I have to say that this game was the biggest disappointment of the year.  The game is decent, but I was expecting a whole lot more.  I think the biggest disappointment for me in the game was the story.  Every little piece of news I got from this game was that the gameplay may be a bit light, but the Schafer writing and humor will carry the game.  In this case--I don't it did.  The beginning was great.  I loved the set-up.  I loved that neo-rock-metal boy-band in the beginning of the game.  I loved the story up until the part after the demo ended.  Once the game proper started, I felt that while some of the dialogue was funny, it wasn't nearly a funny or as clever as past Schafer games.  While I could tell that the world had a great history and backstory--really none of that came through in the game.  I think a big opportunity was lost in telling the story of the world, and not just the fight of humanity against the demons.  I felt like I was going from location to location, knowing each new venue was supposed to be bad-assed, but learning nothing about the places I fought in.  To make things worse, the story just sort of stops mid-way and decides to take you to random place to random place (no idea where I really was) and fight a bunch of battles. 
 
This brings me to my second point of disappointment.  Yes--this is an action game/RTS.  The problem is that through out the short campaign, I never felt like I had any idea what the hell I was doing in the RTS mode of the game.  The last RTS I played was Warcraft III--and that game started gradually, introduced new units slowly, and by the end of each chapter, you had a real idea of what each unit did, and how to effectively use them.  I felt like this game tried to gradually introduce thing--but I never had any idea what the hell any of the units did.  I won the game, and I feel like I had no idea how to manage an effective battle plan.  I was just really spamming units and going around trying to kill as many dudes as possible.  Then, sometimes, the A.I. would decided to attack the enemy stage or other thing I was supposed to attack to progress me through the level.  I never really felt like I was in control--I was just hanging around killing thing hoping that the A.I. would eventually do something good.  Now I realize that I probably wasn't playing the game "right", but I WON THE GAME!!!  How did I win without really knowing what the hell was going on?  In Warcraft III, I always knew what was going on and never really felt like "huh?".  I think the main problems is the lack of missions.  If the game was longer, then perhaps they could have made the learning curve a bit easier.  But the game is pretty short, and you keep seeing new enemy types that you have no idea how to attack or defend against--so you just spam some of your higher level dudes and hope that they can sort things out.   
 
The next problem with the game was the control of your vehicle, the Deuce, aka the druid plow.  I had no idea that this car would play such a big part of the game, but it controls horribly.  I kept running into things, or getting caught up on something.  In the "race here" side missions, I had no idea where I was going and just headed towards the light.  The problem with this tactic is I would invariably go in the wrong direction and end up at a dead end or on the wrong side of a cliff.  Then, every 3rd or so mission is an escort mission.  You basically have to follow behind your escort and shoot at the dudes that attack the tour bus.  If the controls were decent--this might not have been so bad, but I kept running into things and getting hung up on the world geometry.  So I decided to drive very SLOWLY, far behind my escort and just shoot blindly at the enemies ahead--not real fun.  It got real boring fast--and you had to do it like 3-4 times in the game.   
 
Now for the side missions--man, they are some of the most repetitive, useless side missions in any "open world" game (only Mass Effect's side missions were more useless).  The racing missions are useless due to the awful controls of the Deuce, the ambush missions are useless, the "drive the keg here" missions were even worse than the racing missions.  There was almost no fun had in the side missions.  Worse of all, they don't really even expand upon the story--what a waste. 
 
I know I sound like I'm doing nothing but bashing this game, and truth be told, I did have some fun.  But when you get a game knowing that the gameplay is kind of weak, but hoping that the story will be carry it to awesomeness--the failure of the story to inspire, really disappoints.  Not a terrible game, but a game that could have been much, much more.