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Review by John Olin
Written and directed by Tim Schafer, the games creator and lead man of the game’s developer, Double Fine Productions, Brutal Legend is the journey of Eddie Riggs a roadie with a dream that is realized as he is catapulted through time to a mysterious world of heavy metal. Eddie has a simple outlook on life as a band roadie—stay in the shadows and make sure that all goes well while others get the glory. Eddie himself is slightly modeled after and voiced by funny-man actor and lead man of Tenacious D Jack Black. Through the marketing push, demo, and overuse of Jack Black for the masses, and Tim Schafer for the gamers there is one thing that much of the advertisement fails to mention and what will probably catch a lot of less informed gamers off guard--you are essentially playing an open world, action/adventure real-time strategy game.
If not for the venerable force of title creator Tim Schafer along with developer Double Fine Studios, funny man Jack Black, and a who's who of heavy metal cameos with a summarization of heavy metal throughout it's history via the excellently assembled soundtrack you probably wouldn’t have been interested.
Luckily the game does have these things and thankfully it should be enough to keep even the Halo playing, plastic guitar wielding gamers out there interested. The story starts with a bang, quickly belting out a well written and humorous script, with plenty of appropriate swearing and over-the-top blood, that is as long as you want those things and select them when it asks if that is what you like. If not for the blood and swearing this would definitely be great for the teen audience, although it is nice they put in filters to turn both off so more people can play. You are quickly thrown into the gameplay through a series of tutorials that wash over the in-game graphics into a heavy lined graphic showing the aspect of gameplay you are learning. As you awaken in this new world of mysterious metal known as Riggnarok you are quickly plunged into a world where humans are treated less than human, and evil forces prevail. The story and the world itself may seem kind of silly at first, but keep in mind that this is a world where everything lives, breathes, and eats heavy metal music. The unique design and visuals of the game reflects this, and is something that has never really been seen in gaming before. Everyone is wearing tight leather; the trees look like exhaust pipes, and even the wildlife have spike cuffs. Think of it as the animated feature Heavy Metal meets a Pixar film.
Lionwhyte—one of the warlords you got “nut shit” on.
Initially you are armed with a mystical axe and guitar, both of which have their own powerful attacks and can be use in combination. Pressing or holding X, you use you shred on your guitar shocking enemies, or throwing them up in the air, and with your battle-axe you can shred bad guys to a bunch of nasty bits. Using them together, you can shock an enemy in the air, hit them with the axe, and send them flying. You also are able to jump in the air slamming down a chord on your guitar that shakes the ground beneath you, which comes in handy when there are to many enemies to concentrate on at once. There is no real health bar instead you hear your heart pump, the music lowers, and the screen gets red until you get out of harms way and your health regenerates.
At your disposal is mystical tablature you find scattered throughout Riggnarok. By holding down RT, you summon a menu that allows you to select which song you want, followed by a scroll on the screen prompting you to press a series of buttons to summon the effect or object you would like. One of these powers allows you to summon the hotrod car, Druid Plow. The Druid Plow is very useful, especially for traversing the massive landscape as you travel deeper into the world. Besides the campaign story there is all kinds of stuff to do in Brutal Legend including racing with the Druid Plow, helping out the locales against opposing forces, sight seeing through binoculars (that show you in great detail the landmarks you are around), release dragon statues, learn of ancient history, and a little more. These side missions are fun but they quickly become repetitive. It also doesn’t help that you will hear the same dialogue associated with these side missions a dozen plus times. Through these side missions and other various objectives you earn Fire Tributes, essentially money that you can trade in for upgrades to your gear and hotrod at shops you resurrect from the ground called Motor Forge. An added treat to the shop is the shopkeeper, the Guardian of Metal voiced and modeled after none other than Ozzy Osbourne. As I mentioned before you will find plenty of guest cameos in here from comedians, musicians, and even Jack Black’s real life partner Kyle Gass of Tenacious D. In the Motor Forge you can get new moves, weapons for the hotrod, and other upgrades. Unfortunately it isn’t really made clear if one particular upgrade will be more effective than another, slightly hinted in some instances, and even more annoying is you can’t actually change which upgrades you would like to use at any given time, you have to go and find a Motor Forge to do that. Another annoying problem is most of the time after completing a side quest your hotrod has mysteriously disappeared so you have to summon it up again. It doesn’t really hurt the gameplay at all but it can be annoying. What is more troublesome however, especially when helping your buddies out with enemies, is during the mission an enemy could mysteriously disappear and leave you hanging on the mission forcing you to restart. This has happened more than a few times during my playthough and it is unclear if it is the enemies evading or if it is a glitch.
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