Jack Black, the Keanu Reeves of his time, and may God always shine a bright light of beatitude upon him for wearing that cape as long and as well as he did.
After playing the intial sequence of Brutal Legend i was fearing that a lot of its writing would be tainted by the (warranted) sense of elitism a lot of metalheads seem to have over their music, (un)fortunately that's not gonna be the case, instead sticking to just paying homage to the genre in its many forms while delivering a story that does its own thing.
Like many, i went through a metalhead phase back in my day, so playing this game was kinda like turning back into a teenager again and remembering what got me so hyped about the music and the culture for the first time.
Lots of the references have been flying over my head and i wonder how much of the experience i missed out on because of that, for example... why is there a clone of Ozzy Osbourne that is also a bat? No idea, but that side-quest was fun.
Brutal Legend is an open world racing game/hack&slash/RTS that tries out way many things, not truly succeeding in any of them. Usually my stock complaint would go something like "they should have just focused on one genre instead of bloating the game with all these mechanics!" but there's something weirdly abstract yet concrete in the confidence exuded by Double Fine and the way they throw all these gimmicks in your face. I really wish i could explain it better, like i said there's no one true "great" or even fully developed aspect in the gameplay worth praising... and yet the primal part of my brain doesn't seem to mind the approach this go around. But we gotta talk about the RTS parts.
Even as someone with a limited experience in strategy games, it's not hard to figure out what's wrong with these sections. Yeah, the arenas may not be all that big, but not having a mini-map available to check out where your units are can be annoying at times, and it would sure be nice if there was a more precise way to target or move around your units, alongside more information on display about the health of bases, mana sources and other destructible objects. Was also hoping that on PC there would be a more favourable control scheme, and was disappointed upon noticing that it's pretty much the same as for consoles.
Any frustration deriving from these flaws is technically mitigated by how easy it is to go through the RTS parts, and while a lower difficulty is perfectly fine on paper, especially for such a multifaceted game such as Brutal Legend that requires you to wear many hats, oftentimes i'm just left asking myself "wait, that's it?" once a level is over seemingly all of a sudden. I would have happily traded more quality of life features and control over the gameplay for a slightly higher difficulty.
I don't know if it's something i did with the settings or my graphic card, but my experience on PC playing Brutal Legend was rough, man. It ran fine, no crashes or anything like that, just bugs, A LOT of bugs. Hair physics being all over the place, camera angles not working as intended, jittery animations, voice clips overlapping each others, deaths happening seemingly for no reason, and there is a secondary mission that softlocks the game without fail if you start it over. I don't remember my first playthrough on 360 being this problematic.
Ignoring these technical blemishes, Brutal Legend is aesthetically quite a nice looking game! I love the way every human is such a cartoonish caricature, and i also dig the design of the demons, but the best part of the big picture for my money has to be the design of the world map: i like how there's so many well distinct areas with their unique aesthetics, they almost feel like separate worlds you'd see in a more linear game. When i was a kid i always caught myself wondering how these crazy colorful worlds from platforms and other such genres would be connected if they portrayed their full geography instead of just where the player is supposed to go, so i'm really happy Brutal Legend went for this approach, design flaws of the time and all.
This review was supposed to start off with a short recap of my own personal lore. Had this game on my Steam library for many many years, forgot why i bought it and i haven't picked it up once i'm pretty sure, until the last 3 days or so, motivated by wanting to shrink my backlog just a little bit, since i was so sure i didn't beat Brutal Legend when i owned it on console. Turns out... i did beat it. In fact, the final boss battle sequence was the only thing i remembered from the story itself, what's up with that? Well, the lore of this game goes far and wide in all directions, and has quite an extensive animated sequence of events telling everything that happened to the world up to Eddie Riggs's arrival, but if you don't go look for these things the story can feel quite unsatisfactory and half baked, which is probably why i didn't truly felt satisfied with my first playthrough. Lots of loose ends and stuff that comes across underdeveloped on its surface.
So yeah, i guess if you want to check out Brutal Legend keep this in mind: it's a short game, so take it easy. Explore the landscape, talk with the NPCs, smell the roses and whatnot. I can't in good faith guarantee that everyone will enjoy the ride for all it offers gameplay-wise, what i can guarantee is that you'll listen to a lot of good music and a lot of funny dialogue.
