- Publisher: EA
- Developer: Double Fine
- ESRB Rating: “M” For Mature
- Genre: Action / RTS
- Pros: Very funny; Jack Black; amazing soundtrack; cool art style
- Cons: RTS gameplay kinda sucks; the theme and humor won’t mesh with everyone; gameplay feels more like filler between jokes than anything substantial
The story in Brutal Legend starts out as pure rock greatness. You play as Jack Black … er, Eddie Riggs, a roadie for an awful pop rock band who, in an accident, is transported to a land of heavy metal clichés. You meet up with a group of beaten down people, desperate to fight back against their oppressors. With Eddie’s help, they build an army and take their revolution on the road to fight any demons and other nasties that get in their way.
The story and jokes are definitely the stars of the show in Brutal Legend. It plays out sort of like Heavy Metal (the movie) meets Spinal Tap meets Metalocalypse, so it is full of over the top imagery, metal clichés, and inside jokes that fans of all of that stuff will appreciate. When you toss in a solid performance by Jack Black as Riggs, and voicework by Lemmy Kilmister, Lita Ford, Rob Halford, Ozzy Osbourne, and Tenacious D’s (and Trainwreck) Kyle Gass, you have a towering inferno of metal talent all working together in this game to make it awesome.
It has to be said, though, that if you don’t like Jack Black or heavy metal, it is going to be a struggle to enjoy Brutal Legend. You’re not going to get the jokes and Black will grate on you and you’ll hate it. Fair warning.
Gameplay
The gameplay is split into a few parts. There are on-foot sections where you run around an open world as Eddie and explore and find hidden goodies and hack enemies up with an ax or use his guitar to attack them with fire and lightning. You also learn guitar solos throughout the game that you play by following button presses as they scroll across the top of the screen. These parts basically feel like a Zelda game, and the guitar solos are like using the Wand of Wind in Wind Waker. If the gameplay only consisted of these on-foot parts, it could have been quite good.
But it isn’t just Zelda-style hacking and slashing, and that is where the problems come in. To move around the large game world faster, you have a car. This is fine, and the car is cool, but it controls like a brick sliding around on ice and tends to get stuck on the scenery a lot. Thankfully, you don’t ever need precision control while you’re driving the car, but it would have been a lot more enjoyable if it didn’t control so poorly.
Sounds cool, right? It would be, if it all didn’t control so terribly. Your unit A.I. is awful so you have to micromanage them and tell them to do everything. Victory conditions are also never really clearly spelled out, so you’ll keep fighting and not really know what to do and then all of a sudden win and not understand why. The controls during the stage battles for directing units are awkward at best (and generally boils down to the tried and true “send everyone in one direction” method, anyway), and the whole concept gets really stale long before the end of the game.
