Picking Up Steam: Brutal Legend (PC)
Brutal Legend has earned itself a bit of a reputation for how its gameplay format shifts the deeper in you get. Starting off looking like an action hack-and-slash game, revealing an open world you traverse in a vehicle, and then slowly shifting more and more towards a real-time strategy army commanding format, it can almost feel like Brutal Legend isn’t sure what it wants to be precisely. However, while certain parts of the game are let down a bit by a lack of focus, there is one thing Brutal Legend cares about most of all that it nails superbly, and that’s showing off its love of heavy metal music.
When you turn on the game, you’ll first see a fun live-action scene of the actor Jack Black taking you to the back of a record shop, the events of Brutal Legend presented as if they were found on a vinyl hidden in plain sight. There’s even a great touch where the menus are all found on the record sleeve, but once you start the game, you’ll find yourself playing as Eddie Riggs who is voiced by Jack Black himself. Eddie is a roadie, working behind the scenes to support a modern metal band that doesn’t match the kind of heavy metal he loves. When an accident occurs on stage and Eddie throws himself in the path of it, his sacrifice instead ends up his salvation, some of his blood spilling into his belt buckle and transporting him to an ancient land that heavily revolves around metal music. Not only does a guitar now have the power to emit flames and lightning in this world, but the very landscape is built from common metal iconography. Cliffsides have built in speakers, spiders spin guitar strings, and even the trees have exhaust pipes for branches. It’s a world that revolves around music and with surprisingly deep and earnestly presented lore about how it was built from the corpse of the great metal beast Ormagöden that adorns Eddie’s belt buckle. It is, in essence, a world fashioned out of the essence of heavy metal where the wildlife can have the same makeup as the band KISS and it’s not treated as absurd, Eddie not only feeling like he’s found where he belongs, but he can be the one to help the humans rise above their demonic tormentors in this land of blood and battle.
As a roadie, Eddie doesn’t want to be the front man of a resistance, instead trying to coordinate efforts and expand the ragtag team fighting against the demonic rulers who have enslaved humanity. At first this involves a bit of delightful absurdity, freeing young men who headbang not to music but as a means of mining ore, but soon it instead becomes a great way to rollout the impressive cast of voice actors that Double Fine managed to swing for this tribute to all things metal. Musical legends like Lemmy Kilmister and Ozzy Osbourne play stand-ins for themselves that pack a lot of personality, professional voice actors Tim Curry and Brian Posehn serve as the delightfully cruel demonic ruler Doviculus and the low key egotistical Hunter respectively, and even common video game voices like Jennifer Hale help the game have effective performances that aren’t just ways of paying homage to the greats. The soundtrack on the other hand is unrepentant in its indulgence in the way you’d hope for a game built around a genre of music so heavily. While it has some original tracks that can set the mood well during specific moments like sneaking into the spider lair, other moments will be underscored with licensed tracks or available on your vehicle’s radio. Music from Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Def Leppard, Rob Zombie, Megadeth, and so many more including names that are likely to be new even to a metal fan give the 107 licensed tracks a great spread of classics of the genre and new favorites to discover, and some tracks like Through the Fire and the Flames by Dragonforce or Mr. Crowley by Ozzy Osbourne will first debut during scenes or action setpieces that feel like surprisingly good matches for their tones if not necessarily their lyrics.
Even someone with little familiarity with metal music and its accoutrements will still feel the adoration for the genre radiate off every inch of Brutal Legend, and with Eddie Riggs adding an outsider perspective to the world for an appreciated dash of humor, it’s a game whose tone and world are easy to get swept up in. However, then comes the gameplay mishmash that was mentioned at the start of this review. At first Brutal Legend seems like it’s going to be focused on combat, Eddie fighting with an axe and guitar against demons for the opener. Once you get your hands on Eddie’s car, the Druid Plow, you are then given a little freedom to explore around, the open world of Brutal Legend having things to find like new music tracks, new guitar solos you can use in combat, and side missions that often are quick combat challenges, albeit ones without a lot of substance. There are races that are too easy, quick fights where losses can come rather swiftly from your weak allies falling, and the Hunter’s missions that are just something to be done while exploring, but they’re often not huge time investments and they reward you with the Fire Tributes you use to buy upgrades and new cosmetics from Osbourne’s character the Guardian of Metal. Even when you do fight a boss as Eddie on foot though, you might notice that he’ll quickly heal if he avoids damage and most enemies can be beat back by mashing your attack button, but that’s because the action isn’t Brutal Legend’s main focus.
Instead, it’s the army commanding that gradually asserts itself as the primary way you’ll be dealing with the main threats of Brutal Legend’s story and how you can continue the action over in the multiplayer component. In an army battle, you will take your commander out on the field to fight alongside your allies, but first you must construct merch booths to generate fans that then allow you to summon troops from your battle stage. Unsurprisingly the strategy elements are also soaked in appropriate iconography, but this mostly means you need to gather resources to keep generating new troops to send out and eventually break down the opponent’s stage. There are three army types that do fight in considerably different ways thanks to unique troop types and their leader having different powers. Doviculus and his Tainted Coil for example can summon troops directly on the battlefield instead of needing to have his units appear from the stage every time, and with their reliable healing they can be a menace in the game’s multiplayer fights. Every faction will essentially have basic fighters, long range attackers, healers, and then some specialized units like the Bride of Drowning Doom slowing enemy units while the Roadies of Eddie’s Ironheade will be invisible to the opposition until they begin their attack.
You are expected to fight closely with your troops it seems as well. Not only do all the commanders have team attacks with each unit type, but commanding your forces is usually a bit clunky. Since you as the commander are on the battlefield yourself, it can be difficult to order troops around if they’re not nearby, and while there are means for more granular commanding of specific unit types, precision management is a little sloppy and doesn’t always survive contact with combat. Troops will sometimes decide to alter their targets and lose focus, something that can lead to your forces being wiped since they won’t focus on that healer you told them to strike, which is one reason you seemingly are meant to be there accompanying them. You can tear up the major threats or distract minions, and those guitar solos you can find in the story can provide a great deal of useful functions to tip the scales in your favor. Battle Cry will boost your nearby troops, Facemelter can easily kill and baddies near to you, Call of the Wild lets you generate the strongest animal type you’ve killed in the Hunter side missions, and you can even call the Druid Plow into battle if you’d rather fight from behind the wheel. In multiplayer the different commanders have unique solos as well and things are reined in a touch so the most powerful and helpful ones have to be worked up to during the fight, but in the less restrained story mode the power of these can help ease the transition in game type since you have such strong powers in your pocket. The army battles are always going to be a bit held back in complexity by your need to be in the fray and the sometimes weak troop AI, but they work well enough as an evolution of the game’s combat and can be decent to dabble in over in multiplayer where there are even unique arenas like the Crucible of the Titans where you must make sure your troops aren’t decimated by the swinging hammers of the Titans striking the anvils you must cross.
THE VERDICT: Brutal Legend revels in its world literally built from heavy metal, the presentation, licensed soundtrack, characters, and even gameplay concepts having the genre and its aesthetics deeply ingrained to the point this might be the perfect game for a fan of such music. However, while it expertly embodies the heavy metal genre, its more confused approach to video game genre leads to a lot of ideas that don’t quite thrive. The hack-and-slash action is simple and the open world’s extra missions that often use it are rather plain too, but the army commanding, despite being held back a bit by having to play as an active commander, does have room for some interesting play despite its own underbaked elements. The story, world, and devotion to the theme keep you wanting to press on even when the gameplay doesn’t always measure up, Brutal Legend still hard not to love for how thoroughly its musical fandom is on proud display.
And so, I give Brutal Legend for PC…
An OKAY rating. Hack and slash action, vehicle based open world exploration, and RTS-style army commanding are all ideas that can work well and would have been a fine fit for Brutal Legend if they weren’t trying to coexist. Elements of one will appear in the other and rob it of some of the potential, such as the fights you do as Eddie Riggs alone always being rather easy since he’s basically unkillable thanks to the regenerating health he needs to make his work as an army commander in the fray function well. Meanwhile, the side quests around the map aren’t often ambitious or particularly interesting since they’re often trying to provide small slices of the two gameplay types where fighting personally is too simple in miniature and stripping the army combat down leaves it a bit mindless. However, there are moments where the gameplay styles can find their footing that mean Brutal Legend isn’t just about taking in the sights and sounds of its world. Exploring to find guitar solos or earning Fire Tributes through quick interactions like taking huge jumps is rewarding as is just seeing the creative shape of various monuments and different regions in this rock and roll world. Army battles are well handled in the story to ease you in, and when they do start to amp up, the fact you can get involved personally helps mitigate some of the increasing difficulty and ease up on the issues caused by troops that can sometimes seem too easily distracted or rough to give specific orders too. The different gameplay styles do all have the nugget of something enjoyable but don’t always go far enough or seem like they have limited space to grow, like only having the three army types or how the Tainted Coil gets to circumvent the tedious process of calling troops over from the stage. The idea of having an involved playable commander is one with potential, especially if the RTS elements allowed for more specific instructing of your troops with ease so that your strategy wouldn’t be undermined by having to literally move over to where troops are, but there’s still satisfaction to be found in putting together a good plan and executing it so it doesn’t feel like Brutal Legend got worse with the format shift.
Amusingly, it wasn’t the genre shifts that made me drop Brutal Legend back in 2013. I had not even reached any of the strategy sections. I had just reached the open world driving and perhaps seeing all the new tasks before me, I felt I didn’t have the time for it and stepped away from a game dripping with character. Brutal Legend’s personality is so strong that it dominates the feel of the experience more than any other element. Getting swept up in the love for metal music and how it has been so thoroughly realized easily covers up the moments of plainer play in your memory and make you want to continue on even when a story mission suffers from imprecise controls since it tries to marry the many systems into a new objective type. Driving missions may rarely be challenging, the hack and slash action never really evolves, and the army commanding can have its hiccups, but they all do their part in giving you a chance to experience more of this world, its music, and its fun twists on metal iconography. So many little flaws are pretty apparent when you start thinking about the actions you take in game, but none of them can withstand the power of rock that permeates through Brutal Legend.