Negative Gamer Review: Brutal Legend (Xbox 360)

Business mergers. Cancellations. Lawsuits. “Brutal” is certainly an apt description for the journey to market taken by Tim Schafer’s latest game. As the creative mind behind the critically successfully but commercially lacking Grim Fandango and Psychonauts, Schafer is probably hoping that Brutal Legend will be able to leave its troubled development history behind and become a genuine hit.

The game stars Jack Black as Eddie Riggs, a roadie who magically travels back in time to a heavy metal inspired fantasy land where guitar solos can literally melt your face off. Its inhabitants have been enslaved by demons and forgotten the teachings of the metal god Ormagöden, so Riggs joins a band of resistance fighters and shows them how to rock.

Putting the band back together

Brutal Legend manages a rare feat; it is less than the sum of its parts. What begins as a God of War-style action-adventure transitions into an open-world collectathon before becoming an RTS dressed in the trappings of putting on a rock concert. I’m a big fan of genre bending but this is too much for one game to handle, and it suffers for it.

The on-foot combat is fun and doesn’t become repetitive as I had feared, since you can upgrade your skills with a visit to the Guardian of Metal, superbly played by Ozzy Osbourne. My enjoyment was hampered on more than one occasion however, due to the lack of a jump button.

Falling in to a piece of level geometry that you can’t get out of without reloading the game is simply inexcusable, especially as Eddie later gains the ability to fly by pushing on the right stick. You can only do this during the RTS stage battles though, and I don’t understand why it wasn’t allowed for the rest of the game.

Flying is clearly essential for the stage battles however, giving you the ability to survey your troops from on high and quickly navigate the battlefield. You acquire a variety of metal-themed troops like headbangers and bouncers, each with their own speciality. Commanding them is simple, with any members of your army with in ear-shot reacting to basic attack/defend/halt instructions mapped to the d-pad. A fourth command also allows you to place a marker with the left bumper and direct your forces to it.

The aim of each battle is to either defend your stage or destroy the enemies, and for the first couple of missions I appreciated the simplicity of the controls. You can give troops individual orders but it’s not really necessary and easier to direct the army as a whole. Because of this, success comes down to choosing the best mix of units. There is quite a strict population cap on the number of troops you can have, so picking the right ones does require some thought.

Run For The Hills

My problems began once I had defeated the game’s first boss, Lionwhyte. He leads a glam metal version of your own forces, and while this did sometimes lead to me confusing friend for foe, it meant I understood the strengths and weakness of all the enemy units. When I moved on to the next set of battles against goth metal forces, I found it much more difficult. In the first battle against them I fought an hour-long stalemate, eventually giving up when I realised it wasn’t going anywhere.

It was clear I needed to be more powerful, so I returned to the game’s open-world to beef up. Scattered around the landscape are all manner of collectibles: serpent statues that upgrade your health, tab slabs granting additional guitar solo special moves and a bunch of others.

Jamming to Black Sabbath while you drive around the world and check out the gorgeous scenery is great fun, but I had mostly ignored the collectibles because I tend not to bother with them in any game. I didn’t have much choice in the end though, as hunting a few of them down was the only way I got past the difficult stage battle.

I’d also been skipping over collectibles and the open-world in general because I found the story so engrossing. Superb dialogue, characters, and animation meant I wanted to push on with the missions and watch the next cutscene. This quality is held up throughout the game, but towards the end the story pacing is thrown straight out of the window.

The first act of the story ends with the defeat of Lionwhyte, and the second deals with the rise of a new enemy. Far too quickly, the second act segues in to an extremely brief third, and the game is over. It’s clear that much of the game was cut, because the framework is obviously there for a fully-fledged third act in which Riggs and his army fight their way back across the land. Maybe we could see this as DLC, but its absence is notable, especially considering the length of time Brutal Legend was in development.

Story isn’t the only element that feels a little lean. The game’s side missions follow the Assassin’s Creed model, with a small number of tasks that quickly become repetitive. Ambushing an enemy force or directing a mortar cannon (crewed by Jack Black’s former bandmate Kyle Gass) is fun for a while, but I didn’t feel the need to do it more than a few times.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• The intro video, in which Jack Black finds a mysterious record which serves as the game’s menu, is brilliant. Once. For some reason it plays every time you load the game. Yes it’s skippable, but annoying nonetheless.
• For a game that’s all about the music, there are some surprising audio problems. Lines of dialogue sometimes overlap or end too early, and the sound mixing can vary wildly.
• A fantastic sequence after defeating Lionwhyte is accompanied by everyone’s favourite Guitar Hero III track, Dragonforce’s Through the Fire and Flames. It’s an incredibly effective choice of music, but it’s laid over a frustratingly difficult driving sequence that results in instadeath if you do it wrong. Again, repetition is Brutal Legend‘s downfall, and this scene left a bitter taste after the fifth or sixth attempt.
• I admit to playing only a few matches of the multiplayer stage battles, which allow players to lead one of the three factions against up to seven others. Somehow I found it much less appealing than the AI battles in the story, but maybe that’s just because I’m not very good at it.

On paper, Brutal Legend should be one 2009′s top games. It’s got loads of incredibly talented people behind it, some truly unique ideas, and a setting that is nothing less than a love letter to metalheads everywhere. Like the game itself all of these parts somehow fail to come together, and Brutal Legend falls well short of the masterpiece it could have been.

Brutal Legend is by no means a terrible game, I had a great time playing despite all of its faults – in fact I had some of my best gaming moments of the year while in Eddie Rigg’s shoes. I’m eagerly awaiting Tim Schafer’s next game, because the worlds he creates and the characters he fills them with are amongst gaming’s best. I just hope he can get the technical and game mechanic side of things right next time.

You should play this game if…

…you can look past all its faults, and you really should do.

Final score

While the game’s setting and story are turned up to 11, weak mechanics and technical problems combined with an under-developed structure leave a lot to be desired.

(What does this score mean?)