Shenanigans & Tomfoolery

This is actually less of a review and more of a rant.

And it’s not a rant because I hate the game, it’s a rant because I really, really wanted to like it and was met with major disappointment upon playing it. This wasn’t due to lofty expectations of mine either, but because of what I believe are some bad choices in major design elements.

More after the break.

I’ll be very broad here. I won’t be talking much about specifics because I don’t think that’s where the problems in this game lie.

If I had to describe Brütal Legend I’d say it’s an open world, real-time strategy game with some action elements in it. It’s that last part, the action bits, where the game is most successful and bashing people’s heads with an axe is competent and fun enough. I never expected Devil May Cry levels of complexity and depth out of this game in terms of combat so I was satisfied with what this game had to offer (though it did that me a while to get used to the fact that you can’t jump). It’s the other two parts of that earlier description where the game starts to fall apart.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a big fan of open world games. I did get a great deal of enjoyment out of both Grand Theft Auto IV and Infamous though, so it’s not as if I’m completely adverse to such games. The problem with Brütal Legend is that it doesn’t handle the open world aspect in any way that can be deemed successful. Brütal Legend is, for all intents and purposes, a linear game. As soon as you finish a mission you’re left off right where the next mission starts and you traverse in a beeline throughout the entire world map this way. Because of this, the fantastic heavy metal world ends up being nothing more than a lifeless backdrop instead of a vivid world that begs to be explored such as those found in my two examples above. So what is the purpose of this open world then? Nothing but padding, I’d say. The main quest is over before you realize it and the half-baked open world gives players a chance to artificially extend the game’s shelf life, if they feel inclined to run around looking for pointless, irrelevant stuff, that is. I know I wasn’t.

It’s not just in gameplay that this open world does a disservice though. I think that, in terms of presentation, a straight up, proper linear structure would’ve served this game better. Brütal Legend is set in a heavy metal inspired world and it’s a fantastic place to look at but again, because the structure of the game doesn’t encourage exploration, you’ll inevitably miss out on a lot of sights or you won’t get the best views out of them. That’s a waste and I feel that a linear structure would’ve been able to integrate these vistas in to the gameplay better and present them in a more successful manner.

All of this is nowhere near as bad as my other major issue with the game though. Let’s put it this way: what genres come to mind when somebody tells you of a heavy metal inspired video game? I’d say action and rhythm (obviously) are sensible choices. Maybe even racing if we look at something like Burnout. But real-time strategy? Really? Tim Schafer is given the opportunity (and money) to make a heavy metal game and he makes a real time strategy one? As a fan of heavy metal, I just don’t see how that makes a lick of sense.

But let’s put aside the incongruities of using a genre of resource management and methodical thinking to exemplify the shredding, headbanging and over the top qualities of heavy metal for a bit and focus on the game itself. As I recall, Tim Schafer mentioned in one of his interviews that Brütal Legend started as a multiplayer game and that Double Fine later built a single player game around those underlying mechanics. This becomes painfully obvious in the single player quest and you soon realize that you’re playing nothing but an extended tutorial for the multiplayer mode in the game. You slowly start acquiring different types of troops and you’re taught what their respective strenghts and weaknesses are and whathaveyou. I’ll be honest once again and mention that I generally don’t like real-time strategy games either but I found what’s on display here to be clunky to say the least. Troop selection is awkward and unnatural and I never got a good grasp of what I was doing or how I was doing it. The “strategy” here basically amounted to two steps: 1) build as many troops as you can and 2) throw them all at your enemy and hope they survive. I’m sure there’s a better way of doing it but I just didn’t care enough to figure out what it was.

That’s ultimately my problem with this game. I didn’t care enough to learn the nuances of every troop type. I didn’t care enough to explore the world. I didn’t care enough to even touch the multiplayer. I just didn’t care. What’s really upsetting though, is that the one game that was made just for that (shrinking) metal audience is a mediocre one. And it’s even more disappointing because Brütal Legend has so much going for it; it has Lemmy and Ozzy and Rob Halford (and it’s really cool when you first see them); it has great animation and characters and a fantastic soundtrack (Judas Priest’s Painkiller plays during the last boss fight); it has an amazing sense of design with elements that are true to the music it pays ode to (huge guitar monuments, panthers with laser beams shooting out their eyes, rivers of boiling metal, etc, etc) but, unfortunately, none of it adds up to a good game.

I could never in my right mind recommend this game to anybody and that, to me, is more upsetting than having blown 60 bucks on it.

(I actually got it on sale.)