Tim Schafer is known for critically acclaimed titles, what may be the best of which, “Psychonauts,” never caught on in the mainstream market despite being one of the most creative titles released on the original Xbox. Tim Schafer is such a character himself that games are referred to as his games and not his studio’s games (Double Fine Productions, BTW). Brütal Legend had a tough time getting onto your Xbox 360 or PS3, there was a huge publishing issue that arose when Vivendi Games was merged with Activision and Activision Blizzard (the resulting company), dropped Brütal Legend altogether. EA came in to publish the title and, as you can imagine, several lawsuits were filed. Eventually, everything was cleared up out of court and Rocktober would become the month that we would be able to bring part of Tim Schafer’s imagination home with us.

Read on for the full review…

Brütal Legend Review

Let me first say that I am not a HUGE metal fan. In fact, since I really should disclose this, I don’t really listen to any metal at all on a regular basis, but I have been a fan of music as a whole for years, I know band names and band members, and understand the cultish following of the metal genre. I understand how these things are important to this game.

Brütal Legend really only had me hooked once I had the chance to play the demo. I had read articles, previews, and watched video demonstrations, but for some reason I was still expecting a mediocre experience. When the demo was finally released and I had the chance to pick up the controller and experience the title first-hand though, I found myself laughing throughout the fifteen-minute demo, I played it three times actually because I was so entertained. The demo is a little deceiving though. While the humor is carried throughout, you don’t have another battle like the one you had in the demo at any other point in the game, and there is a very good reason for that. Brütal Legend began as a Real Time Strategy game (RTS for the gamer, and from here on out), which are normally created as PC games (Age of Empires, Command & Conquer, etc), but with a twist – Schafer wanted you to be able to seamlessly join in on the action as a playable character instead of “playing God” throughout the entire game.

Just one very small part of the open world. Click any image to enlarge.So Brütal Legend is effectively two games in one; first and most prominent, it is an action-adventure game set in an open world, and second, as an RTS – but only during stage battles, more on those in a bit. Once you have made it through the tutorial level (the demo level), where you are introduced to Eddie Riggs – the main character, and the character you play as throughout the game, Ophelia – Eddie’s crush, and the Deuce (your hot rod), you are unleashed in a world full of weird creatures, cultures, artwork, and designs. What you are essentially given is an entire world based off of the art on that has been on the album covers of metal groups from the past 30 years or so. The world is a lot larger than initially suggested, and every new mission takes you to a new area. The beauty of the evolving artwork really makes each new area unique and keeps you from experiencing the same look repeatedly over the course of the game.

Eddie slashing up some roadies..The story of Brütal Legend is simple enough; it is a basic good vs. evil scenario, but with a protagonist who is experiencing everything in the land for the first time. The real joy that you will find here is the amazing sense of humor that flows with every conversation, whether it be an over-the-top line of dialog, or some funny reference to metal. The characters that you will meet along the way are all interesting, and I actually found myself really attached to some of the characters as the game progressed. The writing here is absolutely fantastic, you can tell that Schafer’s ideas were taken as spoken word by his team at Double Fine, as his ideas seem to be fully realized. The dialog is humorous, witty, it constantly refers back to its “metal” origination, and then it takes it all one step further.  Excellent job on the part of Tim Schafer and his team to make everything work so well on the story front, because if this weren’t believable, we would really have an uninteresting mess of a game.

This brings me to the graphics, aside from the occasional herd of friendly troop or wild animal that tend to pop up as you are cruising across the land in the Deuce, the graphics here are about in line with what you should expect from this type of game. All of the creature designs are fantastic, the world is beautiful, and the main characters look exactly as they should at all times. The designs are some of the most creative that I have ever seen, and fit in so well with the theme of the game that I found myself laughing to myself and saying, “Ha ha, that’s awesome!,” repeatedly throughout.

The backside of Eddie's main love interest, Ophelia, and the Deuce...The voice cast is awesome, surprisingly awesome actually. I may be the only one who had this thought, but I hardly expected a bunch of 70’s era rockers to be able to speak, and I couldn’t have been more wrong - all of the celebrity voiced characters do an amazing job, even the often-hard-to-understand Ozzy Osbourne. Eddie Riggs is voiced and partially modeled after Jack Black, which works out really well, I honestly couldn’t think of a better celebrity to carry this type of game. Jack Black brings his enthusiastic attitude into the game behind his voice and it really gets you into the character. As I said before, all of the voices here are done so well that I actually had a genuine attachment to a few of the characters. If anyone in the world is an excellent bad guy, it’s Tim Curry, and he delivers a perfect vocal performance in this game as well. You will recognize other voices (and faces) as the game progresses, and it’s always an entertaining experience. There are over 100 audio tracks in this game, and despite the fact that I don’t listen to metal, I found myself really enjoying the soundtrack. On top of the 100+ audio tracks there is a ton of original content that in woven throughout the game as well. The thing that makes this so awesome is that it ensures that you aren’t going to be sick of driving around in the Deuce for hours while you complete the secondary missions. If I had to complain about the audio I have to complain very specifically about the voices on all of the secondary missions. The voice work isn’t bad, just repetitive. Every time you do a race for instance, the introduction is the same and the dialog that is shouted from one car to the other throughout the race is identical. The same thing goes with the ambush missions and on a smaller scale, the hunter missions.

Another view of the land and some of the artistic direction. 

The gameplay is where I will have the roughest time, because despite the great humor, graphics, and audio, the gameplay suffers a little, first from the repetitive nature of the secondary missions, and second from the huge change of pace that comes when you enter a stage battle. The secondary missions will help you upgrade your vehicle, your weapons, and will let you add things to the game world, but after doing about five ambush missions and realizing that they are nearly all identical, I became disenchanted with continuing to complete them. The same thing goes with the races, the unfortunate thing about the races is that the collision detection isn’t quite right, so if the individual you are racing against bumps your side a little bit, or touches the back of your car, the Deuce seems to get thrown in some unpredictable way to the right or left, which is usually enough to cause you to lose the race. The second issue that I had was the change of pace. The game goes from an action game to a RTS within seconds – basically for the boss battle (Stage Battle in the game world), and while you really need to keep the RTS moving at the same pace (fast, fast, fast) – it’s a hard adjustment that may cause you to lose a Stage Battle or two after working on it for 30 minutes or so. Starting over from scratch after working on something for such a long time has always been a huge issue for me with RTS’s, it’s always so disappointing to work on something for so long only to have it all crumble before you in less than 5 minutes. Please don’t take too much from this issue with gameplay though, it’s not enough to take away from the experience too much, but it’s really the only part of the game where I really had any issue. One of the only problems with not actually giving a score to reviews (a policy that I may change after this) is that people tend to hang on every negative thing that the writer states, despite the fact that the game may have been a great experience overall, and the issues may not have really been all that impactful as initially described. I certainly never dreaded anything in this game, the gameplay does hold up well enough to ensure that the game is still fantastic, and never takes away from the overall experience, and just tends to be a little repetitive or frustrating at times.

Tim Curry plays this guy - perfectly...So overall, I had a really satisfying experience with Brütal Legend. The game kept me laughing all the way throughout. I had moments of joy, sadness, and frustration – a nice feat to overcome for a game that is based entirely on getting the player into the story. The gameplay issues weren’t enough to make me want to stop playing the game, and I’m sure I will pick up the controller again in the next day or two to get my 100% completion so that I can unlock all of the artwork (it’s really that good) and music. I would suggest that if you are interested in metal, have a musical background, or are interested in video games with great stories and incredible creativity that you pick this title up right away. There’s no way around it, this game was made as a tribute to one of the most popular genres of music that has ever existed, and it’s a tribute that is done so well that it’s a must play for almost everyone. If you like the pop-nonmetal crap that is pushed out nowadays (i.e. if you are offended by them making fun of the music that the band in the demo sings, or if you think that is good music) please play the game and get a sense of where your garbage music was derived from.

I’m sure I’ve managed to make someone upset with this review, so please comment in the area provided below with your opinions, with questions, or anything else you have to say (TLDNR’s are a waste of my time and yours).