Brutal Legend

Brutal Legend for the X-Box 360 is an interesting hybrid of action adventure mixed with Real-Time-Strategy similar to the Overlord series. Like Overlord, you are in command of the main character and act as a general to your forces while roaming the battlefield with a melee weapon. You can slash, use magic, or you can just sit back and let your lackeys do the fighting for you. Both games also offer colorful and lush environments along with humorous dialogue.

Unlike Overlord, in Brutal Legend, your main character has a voice and personality which makes him far more interesting. The world is also much more open, and the means by which you explore it far more fun. I spent over an hour doing nothing but driving around in my car, boosting off jumps and running over wildlife. Not to mention that you can listen to heavy metal music the entire time while doing it.

The story is rather goofy and ridiculous: you play as the world’s greatest roadie Eddie Riggs who gets sent back in time to a world where car engines are dug out of the ground and there are mountains of speakers. Your melee units are a bunch of head bangers with overdeveloped neck muscles. You also run into a number of rock’n role legends like Ozzy Osbourne, but it all fits with the feel of the game which is modeled after every heavy metal CD cover you ever saw. Unfortunately there are some continuity errors in the story. On a few occasions Eddie seems to get some off screen exposition and know things that he shouldn’t, and those moments are rather confusing.

The game starts out as a hack and slash adventure with Eddie running around chopping people up with an ax and electrocuting them with a magic guitar. You try to help the local prince raise an army against the big-haired bad guy, and then the game throws in an RTS element that feels almost like a minigame. You have a stage as your spawn point and tap “fans” as a resource by playing a guitar solo which feels like Guitar Hero on a game controller. You run around the field, ordering up new units and telling them what to kill. The controls for this part of the game are both simple and complicated at the same time. You can order nearby units around with the press of a button, and there are four basic commands to give: attack, follow, or stay. This is all fine when all you want is to send every unit over to a tower and tear it down. The problem is with the strategy part of the real-time-strategy. In order to select a single unit type for a certain job, you have to highlight an area you want them to go, then you have to walk over to one of that unit, click a different button and hold it down, then give the command. It may not sound too difficult but in the middle of a fight it is a real pain to pull off. It’s much easier to do a double team which is a move that allows you to take direct control of any of your units.

These strategy sections only occur during certain points of the story and do not exist in the free play mode, but it is the basis of the mutli player, and it is very hard to make a comeback during these matches if you make a mistake. If you and your army are destroyed, you return to your stage where you must then order up another army, but the units spawn one at a time with a build delay for each, so by the time you have a new army the enemy has marched across the field, destroyed all your resource gathering booths and build their own, and are now ambushing you at your spawn point.

Another problem is that the game’s story mode is very short, only about five hours long if you know what you’re doing. I feel that this is almost tragic because the story, despite being rather silly at times, seemed to have much more potential than this. A race of demons oppress humanity and you have to overthrow them, but you never get to see the demons’ lands. Instead they pay a visit to yours for awhile, and you hang around some creepy scenery, but it belongs to the zombie humans called Tear Drinkers representing the Goth/Death metal crowd. Even with the side missions, some of which are very repetitive, you can clear this game in a single day easily.

This game was partially developed by Jack Black, and although I’m not a fan of him as an actor he did manage to do a somewhat decent job voicing Eddie Riggs in this game. His over the top attempts at being cool do show up a few times. In fact much of this game feels more like what Jack Black thinks heavy metal is about in a very immature teenager sort of way, but it is still a fun game to play as long as you don’t take it too seriously.

There isn’t much replay value to this game as far as redoing the story from the beginning because the game can’t support more than one save file at a time like Ghost Busters which is rather annoying. But there is much fun to be had just driving around the world trying to find all the hidden bound dragons of which there are over a hundred scattered around. You can also unlock new songs to listen to on your radio, buy upgrades for your car and yourself, and just drive around and take in the scenery. Some of the areas in this world of metal are truly breathtaking.

If you’re a fan of the Overlord series, or of heavy metal and rock’n roll, you should definitely give this game a look. Just make sure you don’t turn off the gore or profanity near the start of the game, they handled the censoring very, very badly.