Brutal Legend is quite possibly the best game I’ve played this year. It’s certainly the game I’ve enjoyed playing most this year, although like any great game it’s riddled with flaws. And I’m ashamed to say it’s a game I very nearly didn’t play. While I’d heard great things from publications I trusted I found it to be a hard sell. Money is tight and time is short at this time of year. Was it really in my best interest to drop $60 on a game that I had at best a vague understanding of?
A game which, while made by a designer I trust more than my mother, hadn’t really announced its attentions first hand, which had instead relied on third parties to dribble out little bits and pieces about just what kind of game it is, stepping in only to make cryptic statements such as “it’s not an RTS” when clearly it is. A game where the developer hardly mentioned the meticulously constructed multiplayer portion for which the single player game is a sort of incredibly elaborate and fun tutorial. EA’s marketing machine has done a great job of letting us know what the atmosphere of the game is like without letting us know what kind of a game it will be, and bully on them for it. Atmosphere is a big part of what makes Brutal Legend great. But in a medium where people still buy games based on their generic classification it’s a bit mystifying, and it makes it hard for consumers to make a choice when so many known entities they’re already excited about are coming out.
Which is an absolute shame, because Brutal Legend is an incredible game. It’s what gaming needs more of, and if it wasn’t for Toys’R’Us’ wonderful buy-two-get-one-free sale I never would’ve purchased it. Thanks for having my back for the last twenty five years of my life, TRU. Here’s hoping you outlast the reprehensible people at Game Stop and become a socially acceptable place to buy video games for nerds in the years to come.
Brutal Legend, from the moment you insert the disc, makes no apologies for what it is. The opening scene is a totally genuine portrayal of the people who made the game, the sort of people who take delight in the act of just walking through a record store and poouring surreptitiously at the wondrous items we have no intention to buy. It lets you know who the game is for, who the game is really about, before you’ve even open up the album jacket and peruse the awesome start menu.
Brutal Legend wears its heart on its sleeve in every sense of the world. It is unabashed in its affection for both its subject matter and its characters, but it remains willing to laugh at them. It treats both metal and its enthusiasts with the aplomb and humor they deserve. It’s like a version of Metalocalypse where the characters are real, relatable people instead of hilarious caricatures. It’s nothing like looking into a mirror, but it is like reading a book or watching a movie in that, in a strange twist, a cast of video game characters are up to snuff.
But we’d expect little else from Tim Schafer, and indeed this has been a cornerstone of the marketing campaign surrounding Brutal Legend. As mentioned earlier the characters of the game seem to be used as selling points more than the game itself, with Jack Black appearing in character at press conferences and vamping as Eddie Riggs on Metalocalypse. From Monkey Island to Brutal Legend this has always been a strength of the titles Schafer has worked on and as much a reason to purchase them as the games these characters inhabit.
Unfortunately in the case of Brutal Legend the game itself is kind of a mess. Yahtzee’s hyperbolic review goes a bit far on this front, as expected, but there are some serious issues with the game’s mechanics and controls. As a brawler it lacks significant depth and character advancement is tied to world exploration, a dangerous if ambitious choice. As an open world exploration game the driving controls are frustratingly sloppy and far too many areas can only be accessed by a single route for plot purposes, even if you disregard the various “invisible walls” the game condescends to inform you of with a flow breaking game notification. And there’s no representation on your map for the various areas you’ve explored and most of the collectibles you’ve found, with Metal Forges constituting the sole exception to the rule. Along with the inability to play a waypoint at any location that isn’t a “plot event” and the total absence of any sort of useful map during the completely-but-apparently-not-RTS sequences it seems like the game has a serious problem with maps in general.
As for the RTS game itself, it’s overwhelmingly new and different, with demands that players of traditional RTSes have rarely had cause to consider. Your character becomes a resource himself, and how you spend your time with him is critical. Will you fly around and see what your enemy is getting up to? Take the fight to the other stage and drop a zeppelin on them for good measure? Or will you snatch up all the resource points you can and hope for the best? The way you manage your avatar is as important as the way you manage your fans and units. It’s almost as if the RTS’ golden standard of “actions per minute” as a means of measuring player skill has been represented mechanically. And since RTS games are, to be fair, incredibly hard, it isn’t tough to see why many reviewers who stepped into the game expecting God of War were baffled by the entire thing when they found Sacrifice staring back at them.
But I’d still literally recommend Brutal Legend to anyone, and I mean anyone. I’d recommend it to people who don’t even traditionally play games, and only partially because I want Tim Schafer to have the sort of financial clout to be able to do whatever the fuck he wants. It’s a great introduction to what it means to be a gamer, to put yourself into the shoes of another individual and simultaneously laugh at and cry with that character. It’s pretty easy, although along with the aforementioned difficulties it is also hurt by a general lack of documentation and explanation. Melee a Bride to death to see what I mean.
But it captures what it means to inhabit a new world and a new space perfectly. The world of Brutal Legend is the most vibrant one I’ve experienced this year. Go fuck yourself, Grand Theft Auto 4’s rendition of New York. Brutal Legend takes all the energy you put into making a giant generic cityscape as based on New York as Law and Order is based on actual events and turns it into a world which is, as Schafer promises, ripped from album covers and lyrics. The result is something amazingly immersive which, despite being littered by celebrities, is never overwhelmed by them. Lemmy from Motorhead cracking a joke about drinking a lot and generally being himself seems perfectly natural in Brutal Legend. Ozzy Osbourne’s Guardian of Metal, as well his smaller, more humorously referential character, are both spot on, and feel less like attempts to shoehorn Ozzy into the game and more like categorizations of him within the hierarchy of metal. To continue would be to list off the many talented musicians who lent their voice to the game so I’ll stay my hand. But not before mentioning that many comedy greats make appearances, with Brian Posehn representing my personal favorite in The Hunter. If you’re a fan of The Comedians of Comedy you’ll find a lot to love here.
And with that reference I should make an admission: I’m not much of a metal fan. I liked metal well enough during my youth, but that sentence should betray my ignorance of both the culture and the subject matter. This game made me love metal a lot more. As I said before its genuine affection for the culture and its willingness to display both the breadth of the music, its adherents and the art and culture tangential to the music can easily serve as a primer on what to follow within metal as a genre. Even if your exposure is solely that of the pop culture wallflower you’ll leave this game air guitaring with your controller. You’ll consider the appropriateness of various metal classics in relation to your daily life and you’ll realize just how important Lord of the Rings was the metal as a culture.
To go any deeper into the game would be to issue forth spoilers, and I really don’t want to do that. The sense of discovery that Brutal Legend conveys is one of its greatest strengths, and it’s the rare sort of exploratory game that actually has me sitting down and exploring the world in my sweet ass car. Each time you find a new dragon statue or one of the “legends” which fills you in on the history of the Brutal Land it’s a satisfying and enriching feeling which adds more than just texture to the world. So I’ll leave you with a plea: come play Brutal Legend, not because it’s the cleanest experience, but because it’s likely the most worthwhile way to spent $60 and ten to fourteen hours on your life which has come out this year. See you at the Sea of Black Tears.
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