ps3

Despite being released almost five months ago, I’m still thinking about Brütal Legend, the Tim Schafer/Double Fine Productions heavy metal-themed game. Having a game stick with me long after I’ve finished playing it is nothing new, but the weird thing about Brütal Legend is that I didn’t like it very much. The reason it’s stuck with me this long is, despite not liking it, I really wanted to love it.

Eddie Riggs and friends.

For me personally, Brütal Legend had a lot of good things going for it. Over the years I’ve played two Tim Schafer games (Grim Fandango and Psychonauts) and I loved them both. So I was definitely looking forward to whatever was next on the dude’s plate. I’m also into heavy metal music. I count Iced Earth and Blind Guardian as two of my favorite bands. I also have a healthy appreciation for Motörhead, Judas Priest, and Black Sabbath. And to top it off I’m a fan of Tenacious D. So if you tell me you have an action game based on the fantasy elements of metal, set to a hot metal soundtrack, starring Jack Black, and it’s all put together by the people what made Psychonauts, well son, I will tell you I’m very excited. Unfortunately it didn’t all work out as planned.

Sure, I could go on about how Brütal Legend totally mislead people about its gameplay. Or how the third-person hack-and-slash segments weren’t all that great. Or how driving around in The Deuce (your hot-rod) was made all the more tedious through the lack of a mini-map showing you how to find things. Or I could complain about the tedious and repetitious side-missions. But what I really want to talk about was this: For a game that’s all about metal and kicking ass, Brütal Legend really wasn’t very fun.

A giant chrome spider is pretty fucking metal.

So in case you don’t know the game’s story, allow me to summarize it for you. In Brütal Legend you play as a character named Eddie Riggs (Jack Black) who is described as the the greatest roadie the rock business. While working for the band Kabbage Boy (a completely awful faux-metal teeny-bopper group), Eddie is killed and somehow transported to a world in which everything is inspired by heavy metal. The landscape is covered with heavy metal references, like giant swords and axes, skulls, bones, metal sculptures amps, stage lights and all all kinds of other awesome things. There are demons. There are hot chicks. There are glam rockers and goth rockers. There are giant metal spiders and chopper-pigs and fire-breathing lion-monster things and battle nuns and Lemmy and Rob Halford and even Ozzy…..! It’s all pretty fucking metal.

Anyway, it turns out the humans in this world are enslaved by a bunch of demons. Through various circumstances Eddie meets up with the human resistance and, being the world’s greatest roadie, organizes them into a band/army. By the end of the game Eddie’s army, which he names Ironheade, is made up of groupies, roadies and headbangers, a stage and tour bus, dudes in leather riding choppers, scantily-clad chicks on the fire-lion things, and a bunch of other stuff that really works in the whole band/army way. So all of this is pretty sweet. The problem, and this is the game’s biggest failing, is that eventually you have to command all these characters at once in moderately-sized real-time battles.

Ozzy sez: "What the fuck am I doing in a strategy game?"

And that brings me to my main issue with Brütal Legend: The gameplay is not “metal.” Sure, commanding an army of blood-thirsting warriors is pretty fucking metal, but Brütal Legend handles it in a such an inept way that actually playing the game gets in the way of the fun. I liked the game’s characters and setting way more than I liked playing the damn thing. What’s the point of commanding troops and cutting up dudes if I’m not having a good time doing it? It’s like the designers at Double Fine figured out a great concept for a story but couldn’t decide how to properly implement it.

All Double-Fine had to do was make a funny God Of War-style game. That would have been sufficient. Adding in the open-world, driving around stuff would have been extra icing on the cake. But unfortunately they decided to go further, layering a dumbed-down real-time strategy game on top. These battles were such a pain to play that every time I finished one I was relieved that I would never have to do that again. But I kept playing because I really liked the characters.

Hello, nurse!

Unfortunately just liking the characters turned out to not be enough, because by the end of the game the cool characters were undermined by a lackluster story. SPOILERS HERE! Throughout the story Eddie is referred to as the greatest roadie in the business. He’s someone who uses his skills to make someone else look great.  But as the story progresses it becomes apparent that Eddie is the real leader of the human resistance. Everyone in the band looks up to him for leadership. And yet at the end of the game Eddie steps aside to let Lita Halford (great name, by the way) be the leader of Ironheade.

From a story-telling perspective, this makes Eddie into the same person he was at the very beginning. What’s the point of going through all those battles if Eddie doesn’t learn that he’s not just the world’s greatest roadie, but, instead, he’s the world’s greatest king? the whole story seemed to be leading to that point, and yet it didn’t happen. This was a HUGE disappointment to me.

Tim Curry sez: "I'm just a sweet transvestite."

Sure,  an argument could be made that a smaller, quieter ending is more poignant. But a game called fucking “Brütal Legend” is not about small and quiet. It’s about loud. It’s about violent. It’s about METAL, goddammit! And that’s where Brütal Legend missed the boat: It went for complicated gameplay and a pussified ending when it should have gone FUCKING BANANAS! Chop chop, motherfucker! All aboard the Crazy Train, bitchesssss!!! AHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Ahem….

Y’know, it’s pretty disappointing that the best thing I got out of Brütal Legend was a free GWAR concert. Maybe eventually I’ll accept Brütal Legend as a flawed game that really tried something different. But I don’t think I’ll ever get over the cock-blocked feeling I got from its lackluster story. And that’s a real pain in my fucking balls.