(note: this is my fourth copy of this game, bought it on release on X360, again for the X360 when I lost my original, and a third time for the PS3, then this one when it came to Steam. i also have two more PC copies and the recent itch io release.)
The best game ever made.
It is, from top to bottom, every second of its soundtrack, and every little spike and strip of leather and woven patch over denim and record sleeve, and every swing of the almighty axe and thunderously pyrotechnic power chord, and every line of achingly affectionately cheesy dialogue (especially when it's being delivered by OZZY, ROB HALFORD, OR LEMMY THEMSELVES) an unfettered, undiluted, utterly sincere *love letter* to heavy metal and the many bountiful fruits of its genre tree.
Yes, it is an unfinished tragedy mangled by publishers, yes, the RTS mode was definitely a casualty of this in its balancing and design flaws and general poor integration with the rest of the campaign, yes, it can get a little repetitive towards the end particularly if you grind out all the side content - I do not give a single solitary ♥♥♥♥, because unlike all the rest of the stupid nerd-pandering overproduced drivel seeping from the festering orifices of Mick Gordon and Andrew Hulshult and the games inspired by their faux-industrial dreck, and the swaths of utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ garbage """modern metal""" (most of which is really just lame gimmicky dorkier 2000s metalcore, itself a cancerous tumor that killed the glorious '90s Integrity-Ringworm-H8000 kind'a sound) like Arch Enemy and Lorna Shore and Sleep Token (aptly named, they put me to sleep and their interest in metal is token) which hews to it -
- it is abundantly clear that Double Fine and all else involved actually listen to HEAVY METAL, and not just out of a perfunctory interest in the classics but out of the sort of true-hearted dumpster-diving adoration that leads you to stumbling on Brocas Helm's decrepit drunken asses in ***2008!!!!!!*** Sure, it's easy to go track down a copy of *Defender of the Crown* NOWADAYS - and that's SOLELY BECAUSE OF THIS GAME, because before it came out they were so much of a buried obscurity you couldn't even get underground record stores to order that ♥♥♥♥ on demand if you had CONNECTIONS. And there's just as much devotion and dedication to pulling from the raging hellfires of black metal and the unrelenting violence of death metal - there's thrash classics, there's singalong Ozzy stalwarts, there were contemporary trad and speed metal bands at the very earliest cutting edge of the NWOTHM (LONG before the term had ever been a twinkle in anyone's eye), there's ferocious extremity, there's the very best of the goofy nü-metal it pastiches, and all of that is placed at the very forefront and put on display as a shining crown jewel, not blunted or toned down or dynamically pushed away from the mix to not be intrusive to a broad audience - just like the entire rest of the game, which cranks its tone and intensity up to 10 and STAYS there even in its most dramatic moments, and, astoundingly, manages to get that (pun intended) brutally difficult balance RIGHT.
Most of all, in a way best exemplified by that damn cutscene in one of the early missions with Lars, where you free the headbangers from the mining camp - Brütal Legend channels the *essence* of heavy metal, the *vibe* of it, the romanticism of it, the steadfast belief that even if it is the blackest and sickest and most demented kind there is still magic and verve in the world and glory to be found in pursuing it even if you risk death to claim it, the kind that cannot be expressed with a tongue planted defensively in one's cheek but lolling freely in a berserker's total, knowing absence of self-consciousness:
"Hundreds of our strongest young men, toiling their lives away - like their fathers, and grandfathers, before them; given no tools, forced to break solid rock with nothing but their own thick skulls."
"Well, come on, let's bust 'em out - where's the gate?"
"There is no gate." "What—"
"They have nowhere to go - no idea how to function outside the pit. Society has no use for them, so they stay underground - I wish I could help them, but, I mean... what do you do, with a bunch of kids who don't know how to do anything but bang their heads, all day long?"
"... you start a revolution, Lars."
Eddie tears up, when he says it; I do, too, every single ♥♥♥♥♥♥' time. No other piece of media outside of the music, itself, has ever expressed what metal is, what it means to those of us who were born in wombs of denim and leather and who live and breathe and eat and ♥♥♥♥ and sleep and ♥♥♥♥ and DIE for it - better than this single exchange; and it is but ONE of them, within a game where every detail the developers managed to finish chiseling before they were so wretchedly torn away from it OOZES with such love and reverence.
