Game Curmudgeons

Brütal Legend is fucking awesome. My friend demanded a haiku about it. Here it goes.

Brutally awesome

Tim Schafer makes comedy gold

And spills lots of blood.

There you go. Brütal Legend is awesome, and god damn you all if you don’t buy it after what you did to Psychonauts, you ungrateful pricks. It’s got comedy, blood, incredible music, great acting, and great cutscenes. It’s a game brilliantly put together from a few different elements that always comes back to a brawler core, backed by heavy metal. Great metal. Hell, even Dragonforce is used in an acceptable way, even a GOOD use of them, and I’m far from a fan of theirs.

But hey, you need more than that, right? So I’ll give it to you.

Brütal Legend is a brawler at its core, with lots of free exploration, some RTS elements, some RPG-ish elements even. Most of the time is spent with the player driving or running around alone, taking on enemies and looking for secondary missions. Most of those are ambushing enemies, point defense from a turret, and races. But there’s a few other things to be done, and a few twists on the standards one expects from those missions, and they’re mostly fun (the point defense from a turret is less so, depending on the weapon used). Between that, missions! There are a few base types, escorts and stage battles, with a bit of variety in between, and those are all excellently done.

Aside brawling, there’s lots of driving, lots of exploring, and lots of secrets to find. None are essential, but they include new special abilities, attribute boosts, flame tribute (the currency used to buy upgrades), all of which are damned useful, some easily capable of turning the tide of a battle. Or, and they look really cool. I mean really, who doesn’t want a flaming axe or one that sprays blood when you swing it, even when you haven’t hit anything recently? Nobody I want to know, that’s for damn sure.

It’s not a complicated game for the most part, but it does include sections that are reminiscent of Battlezone, where the player commands forces as well as fights. Follow, attack, and defend orders can be issued, territory is fought for (specifically, resource points that emit fans), units are recruited. The overall execution is simple, but a lot of fun and can be a really intense experience, being on the battlefield you’re issuing commands to, defending your fans and trying to make new ones.

Even in the midst of battles, comedy and heavy metal galore. Over the top violence is standard, lots of dismemberment, harsh language, and fire. Just like the game’s cutscenes and…hell, most of the game, to be honest. Particularly out of Ozzy’s mouth. Oh yes, Ozzy and Lemmy both feature heavily in the game, as do other metal icons and some who just have plenty of cred, like Brian Posehn. It’s a game played as much for the story as anything, and it’s a mostly excellent, despite an unfortunate rush at the end, where a little more story progress would have been great. But hey, there’s always DLC, right?

The game really succeeds in the style department as well. Great dialogue, great sound editing, and amazing visuals. Not for being high polycounts or exceptional models and textures, though they are excellent. Mostly it’s the style. Everything is just…so damn metal. Especially scenery. It all looks like it’s from a heavy metal album cover, every single thing, but hey, so do most characters, most enemies, everything, really. Some from power metal, some speed, some thrash, some black, some death metal. The visual themes all fit different aspects, the various factions get their own musical styles, and everything comes together in an amazing way.

It’s not flawless, of course. Sometimes it gets repetitive. There’s some occasional jumps or oddities with in-engine cutscenes, models can lose accessories they had in an earlier piece only to magically regain them. The turret missions are…eh. The plot rushes a bit at the end, as said earlier, but…well, it just never seems to matter. The only complaint is the game is too short, clocking in at 11 hours with a light amount of exploration. But that was missing a LOT of hidden items, frankly, and there’s plenty of those.

Brütal Legend is an absolute 5/5. There’s a few small issues, but the game is fun, funny, and tremendously creative. It’s a game with definite replay value, a fun multiplayer mode based on the single-player game’s more climactic RTS-Brawler combo battles, and hell, it’s not hard to just sit in a safe place in the Druid Plow listening to the spectacular soundtrack. Go get it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 1:03 am and is filed under Action, RTS, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.