Brutal Legend (Xbox 360)

Imagine a world made of heavy metal, where the trees grow exhaust pipes to be built into hotrods, and buried rock artefacts lay waiting to be discovered so they can release their ear-shredding music back into the sky. Now imagine you’re an everyday roadie with a terrible nu-metal band who accidentally spills blood on his scary skull belt buckle during an onstage accident, and finds himself transported back in time to this world. Welcome to Brutal Legend.

You play the part of the aforementioned roadie, Eddie Riggs, who has unwittingly found himself dumped into the position of the saviour of humanity. Armed with only your trusty guitar and a gigantic doubleheaded axe, you set forth into a world that looks like it fell off a Judas Priest album cover. Fortunately Riggs discovers that he has a natural flair with his newfound axe, and that his guitar can somehow tap into the raw metal magic of the world and cause things to explode or fry when played. After dealing with a few troublesome demonic monks and a psychopathic dominatrix nun, Riggs sets off to try to find his way back. Along the way he meets a renegade band of human metalheads who are determined to rescue the world from the clutches of the evil Emperor Doviculus and free the humans he’s entrapped as slaves, so Eddie decides that what a band really needs is a good roadie…

Brutal Legend is a game that was greatly anticipated by anyone who’s come across Tim Schafer’s design work before – Psychonauts, Grim Fandango, Monkey Island.. all classics. Schafer is known for very richly detailed worlds, superb characterisation and sharp storytelling, so couple that with heavy metal and you should have something unique. The icing on the cake is the inclusion of Jack Black as Eddie Riggs, in a role so perfect for him that he’s instantly believable and consistently entertaining. Somewhere along the development process the focus of the game shifted from the original plans for an RTS, and that’s where things go slightly askew but we’ll come to that.

You’ll spend most of your time exploring the open world environment from a third person perspective, tearing around in Eddies hot rod AKA the Druid Plow (or just The Deuce), jumping out to explore various nooks and crannies, taking on side missions and generally kicking demonic bottom. The world is pretty big but there are relatively few completely open areas so you’ll find yourself backtracking along narrow paths quite a lot in your search for new missions and artefacts. Whilst journeying you’ll discover gateways to the underworld where you can buy new goodies, ancient relics that teach Eddie new guitar riffs to use in battle to varying effect, and chained artefacts that reveal the history of the world in stages when freed. There’s a lot of free range hacking and slashing to be done, coupled with the occasional car race and staged ambush, but every now and then you’ll be faced with a bigger battle where territory is at stake. This is where things get a bit odd.

You’ll find yourself in a situation known as a stage battle, where you have a base in the form of a large stage fit for a metal show that you can use to build units – headbangers, razor girls, thunderhogs etc – and to do this you must harvest the power of fan geysers, which are mini volcanos that spew out spectral heavy metal fans from the core of the earth. You can upgrade your basic units and also your stage to allow the production of stronger units, then order your those into battle as a whole or in groups. Base + resources + units + tech tree + orders = RTS, right? Not according to Mr Schafer, in a rebuttal he released online to answer criticisms of this part of the game - if you play it like an RTS you’ll get frustrated and lose, says he. He also warns you against trying to play from a tactical overview, and tells you that group orders are pretty much useless. Why give toys if you’re going to take them away again?

It seems you have to create your units and then fight alongside them, taking them with you as you go. The tactic seems to be to set a rally point and then advance it up the field as you take on new targets. You’re also supposed to make lots of use of double team attacks, which are when you join with another unit to release an attack stronger than either of you could manage alone. This requires a hands-on approach and lots of slugging, which takes you back out of the tactical overview. It seems that most of the tools you’re given to fight these stages are inappropriate for the job at hand, and it might have been better off as a plain old fashioned group rumble with minimal attack/defend/move/halt commands. As it stands the handling feels clumsy and ill suited to unit management, and the later levels can get very frustrating as the amount of enemy units becomes overpowering.

You’re also supposed to make good use of the solo mechanism, which involves standing still whilst you’re presumably getting hammered and completing a mini guitar hero style button matching game. This will do a number of things from rallying your troops to causing a huge burning Zeppelin to crash into your current location and damage your enemies. It’s another mechanism that just doesn’t sit cleanly with the rest of the action. The side missions you’ll encounter back in the open world can also suffer from repetition and the sense of being slightly disconnected from the story, but the payback for completing them is that you get to hear more of Schafer’s brilliant dialogue so you learn to deal with it.

That said, you can evolve tactics for dealing with those parts, and there’s more than enough to make up for them in the rest of the game. The script and back story are simply superb, the graphical style oozes charm and charisma, and the soundtrack feature 107 (yes, that’s one-oh-seven) carefully chosen tracks from the biggest names in metal from the last 30 years. You’ll meet characters styled on, and voiced by Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy, Rob Halford, Lita Ford and even Kyle Gass - Jack Black’s sidekick in Tenacious D. Each of these not only knock the ball out of the park in their own scenes, but offer all sorts of wisdom and razor sharp one liners as the game progresses and round off the already juicy atmosphere to perfection. If you find the atmosphere a bit too juicy, you can elect to beep out the earthier bits of dialogue, but that’s part of the fun of it – do that, and there won’t be many of Ozzy's lines left! It’s a testament to the quality of the script and the voice acting that when the game takes a dark turn midway through, you realise how much you’ve become attached to the characters despite the comic atmosphere. Making the player care about side characters is a remarkable trick, and one that Schafer knows how to roll out on demand.

Should you buy it then? If you’re a metalhead or a Jack Black fan then the answer is a resounding yes but you’ll need to prepare yourself for the ‘not-an-RTS-at-all-really’ sections and work with them. If you’re an RTS fan you might find the toys on offer lacking and not get enough from the hacky-slashy parts to justify the purchase. The rule of thumb here is that if you’re prepared to accept the quirks then there’s a rich and rewarding story waiting to be uncovered, but go into it with your eyes open.