Brütal Legend

It’s difficult to write a review without ruining some of the surprises that a game provides. After all, your goal as a reviewer is almost akin to that of a sports commentator, who sits back and describes the highlights and the general play, whilst making comment about the quality of said moves. With Brütal Legend though, it’s imperative that you pick up the plotline from the game itself – given that the story is that strong. This review therefore, may see me dancing around the point like…something that dances…um…around something pointed. Oh, shut up. The metaphor is not a familiar friend to me. On we rock.

Almost everyone knows as much as there is to know about the history of the game, but to put it into one sentence: – “Activision made one of the worst decisions in gaming history when they dropped Brütal Legend – a Tim Schaffer (Psychonauts, Grim Fandango) project starring Hollywood actor and arguable musical genius Jack Black – for apparently no reason other than they felt like it, and the game was in limbo until EA picked up the publishing deal.” There. It was a long sentence, but a single sentence nonetheless.

Brütal Legend is a third-person action-adventure/driving/RTS title that encompasses all that is and was good about proper heavy metal and rock. ‘Proper’ in this sense, means not Limp Bizkit. Jack Black stars as Eddie Riggs, the world’s greatest roadie who is – as we join him – lugging kit around for a terrible teen-metal band by the name of Kabbage Boy. By means of the events that unfold within the first few minutes of play (see!), Eddie is transported to an alternate world which draws heavily on heavy metal styles and sounds, and which the habitants of are being oppressed by a vicious leader.

An uprising is on the cards, and Eddie initially has a few nice weapons and attacks at his disposal to dispatch of the hordes. For melee combat, you can drag an axe off your back and start swinging and putting together combos as you’d expect to be able to but primarily, you’ll be using a different kind of axe to deal out the destruction – your ‘Flying V’ guitar, named ‘Clementine.’ With this, you can hit a few free-standing moves, such as blasting out a quick chord to shock your enemy, but with a quick pull on the right trigger, you can invoke some pretty serious solos to influence things. You have to unlock various different types of solos (there are 12 in total) by locating tablature stones that teach Eddie how to play them. You start off with things such as a solo to summon your car, or a face-melter that actually does melt the faces of your foes. Later on, you’ll be able to give your armies a power boost, command your squads or indeed do a little building work, as the game demands, all by playing a solo. To play one, you simply point the analogue stick at whichever one you want to hit, and then press the buttons (displayed on screen in pseudo-tab format) at the right time. None of them are particularly difficult to pull off, and having to do it every single time you want to locate your car is a bit of a pain, but I lived with it well enough.

Your car (which is an absolute beast, in true heavy metal style) seems a little bit over-the-top in terms of how much use you’ll get from it at first. But, you soon realise that Brütal Legend contains a fair amount of secondary challenges and the like that must be driven to. Before each level begins, you’re given the option of starting the next primary challenge now, or waiting until later and going off to explore the game world, sandbox-style. Anyway, if your vehicle – aptly named the “Druid Plow” – wasn’t there, Ozzy Osbourne wouldn’t have been able to put in a decent guest appearance as the Guardian of Metal (otherwise known as the guy who supplies upgrades.)

So, you start off thinking that this is nothing other than a nicely-presented third-person action title with a decent setting, and after a level or so, you’ll still feel the same way. Then, the concept of Stage Battles is explained to you, and you’re thrown into one. Here, the game takes on a distinct RTS flavour, with Eddie being tasked with replenishing his army and giving orders so that the enemy can be defeated. This style of play also makes for a cracking multiplayer experience over Xbox Live for up to eight players – and could well become a surprising multiplayer hit, mainly because the classes are nicely balanced and the power cap (that prevents one team from dominating simply due to the weight of numbers) is wisely implemented.

The RTS portion of the game (which accounts for ever-increasing amounts of the game as you play through) in single-player mode can be somewhat confusing until you’ve failed a number of battles. For one, the game frequently tells you to create new merchandise booths from available fan geysers (which provide you with fans, with which you “buy” new army units), when there aren’t any available fan geysers. This leads to you wandering about, searching for new merch booth locations that don’t exist. Secondly, the beacon that you use to order your troops about the battlefield is incredibly picky about what it wants to target. You want to send everyone to attack a vehicle that’s launching rockets at your guys, but the game refuses to allow you to target it directly on the first five attempts. Go away, come back, try it again…and you can aim everybody at it first time. This is infuriating in the heat of battle, but there are ways around the problem – such as sending your men and women in that general direction, and then telling them to attack everything in that area. One issue that has the potential to cause problems, is that later on in the game, you’re going to NEED to have found all of the solos – or at least the stronger ones. You can beat the game without a full compliment of tabs, but it becomes so unbelievably difficult if you don’t have the heavier strikes that you’ll be tearing your hair out. Quite why you aren’t say, rewarded with new tabs for completing earlier missions, I don’t know – as it is highly unlikely that players will stop to search around for all twelve before heading out into the story proper.

But, the game still manages to overcome these problems in stellar fashion. The storyline that I desperately want to go into detail about, but won’t, twists like a cat on ice-skates (hang on, maybe I can do this metaphor thing) and the missions are fun and challenging enough to keep you hanging on for just one more level, like a…monkey…with…with…no, I’m done.

In terms of aesthetics, there’s only one thing that Brütal Legend had to get right, and that was the soundtrack. The graphics – luckily – weren’t ever going to be the focus of a heavy metal-based title and although they aren’t terrible, they aren’t anything to write home about either, and feature more-than-healthy doses of slowdown at times. Back to the soundtrack though, and you quickly realise that this is the real deal. You know you’ve hit paydirt when you’re playing through a chase sequence, avoiding the firey objects that are raining down from above, whilst the manic energy of Dragonforce’s “Through the Fire and the Flames” is belting out through the speakers. When you note that the game features some 108 different tracks from 75 different bands, that paydirt quickly becomes pure gold.

Guest appearances from the as-mentioned Osbourne, Rob Halford, Lemmy, Lita Ford, Black’s Tenacious D bandmate Kyle Gass and others all help to make Brütal Legend really stand out amongst the crowd. If you’d asked me at this point last year, whether or not I’d be raving about a third-person action title other than Uncharted 2 right now, I’d have laughed in your face. With some obvious exceptions, they’re all generally so unbelievably interchangeable that they fade into insignificance when you’re reeling down your list of the greatest games of all time. Brütal Legend however, manages to break out of that stereotype and draw you in to its world. I’d say that you’ll gasp multiple times as the plot unfolds, and that you’ll crack out more than a few bolts of laughter as Black rolls in some really quite solid lines – love him or hate him (since apparently there’s no in-between when it comes to him, so I’m told by…seemingly everyone on the Internet.) What you’re practically guaranteed to do though, is enjoy the world that Schaffer and co. have created, see right past some very slight technical issues, and immediately declare Brütal Legend to be one of the best and purest videogame experiences of the year. I really can’t recommend this highly enough.