Brütal Legend is awesome.
Not the ‘awesome’ where every facet of the game is of mind-blowing fidelity, but the other (non-dictionary) meaning, as in:
“You know what would be awesome?”
“A panther that can shoot lasers from its eyes”
“Yeah, awesome”.
The reason for this is that Brütal Legend is entirely themed around heavy metal, and the world was supposedly inspired in particular by heavy metal album covers – a medium in which subtlety and artistic merit is roundly rejected in favour of cramming in the most awesome per square inch possible.
You play as Eddie Riggs (who is voiced by Jack Black), a roadie from modern times who yearns for the great days of '70s heavy metal, a wish which is fulfilled when he is transported to a world where heavy metal is wound into the fabric of the universe, but humanity is oppressed by a dark lord. Luckily, he is immediately taken in by a group of human freedom fighters, and has to set about freeing humanity from tyranny using his powers of metal.
The core of the game is a split between demon-slaying action and strategic battles where you create and command a heavy metal themed army to fight off demonic armies. In between these missions you can rove around the world on foot or in your hot rod, finding items or completing basic side missions to please the metal gods and improve your abilities.
If it sounds a weird split, that’s because it is – none of the areas of the game are particularly well executed. The fighting is limited to a small set of moves that don’t flow together particularly well, the driving feels floaty and unnatural, and the strategy is awkward to both understand and control.
Yet, I can forgive it all because of the quality of the presentation of the game. The soundtrack is a big collection of classic heavy metal (including Def Leppard, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motorhead, the Scorpions, Whitesnake and unsurprisingly Tenacious D - which I would happily buy if it became available (and I’m not a lover of ‘the metal’), and is up there with GTA Vice City’s sound track as the best themed sound track to a game, ever. The game’s writing is actually funny and has a nice little plot, and the general theming of the world is, well, awesome – giant engine blocks and pistons stick out of the ground, half buried, there are indeed panthers that shoot lasers from their eyes, and when you want to buy upgrades, the shopkeeper is none other than Ozzy Osbourne – yes, Ozzy.
There is also multiplayer, to allow you to do the strategy battles against others online. To be honest, though, I didn’t really enjoy the strategy enough to warrant much online play, and I don’t think the depth in strategy is there to keep that mode going strongly online for long either. Still, the single player will take 8-12 hours depending on how obsessive you are about finding every last item in the world (as I did), at which point you may start getting a little ‘metal fatigue’ (again, as I did). Also, it’s worth noting that it’s quite easy – I had very few times where I needed to retry a mission, and I was playing on the hardest difficulty for the whole game.
I really recommend that everyone at least tries Brütal Legend. It’s one of the few cases where stellar presentation really does win out over less than stellar gameplay. I’m sure that in years to come it will be held out as one of the stand-out games of the Xbox 360/PS3 generation because it shows that games can be based on more than cutesy characters or bloody violence.
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