Skip to main content

Brütal Legend: Brütally disappointing

Well, it's been a few weeks since I took Brütal Legend out my 360 in frustration, and I just haven't felt like going back to it, so, here's my review:

For some background, Brütal Legend is the latest game from Tim Schafer, who comes from a background of making some of the greatest adventure games ever at Lucas Arts, and is also responsible for the simply amazing Psychonauts, although I never finished that one either. You take on the role of Eddie Riggs, the greatest roadie the world has ever known, Riggs is so metal he just can't stand the modern music scene. During a freak accident, he is killed, and wakes up in a fantasy metal world, where music is power, and everything has spikes. The setting is really where Legend rocks it to eleven, the entire world looks like someone magically brought to life every metal album cover from their high school music collection, the animation is almost on par with a Pixar movie, which is a little incongruous to all of the gore and profanity.

The gameplay tries very hard to defy classification, and does a good job, the closest comparison I can come up with is Guilty Gear 2, which I might be the only person I've heard of that's actually played it. Another close call is Dynasty Warriors, although there's a much heavier emphasis on real time strategy elements. The problem is that a lot of the gameplay elements are slowly introduced, to the point that you may have liked what the game was, up until they added in the last aspect, which then changes the way the game plays going forward. At first you're just running around hacking stuff up with your axe, and blowing eardrums with your other axe, and then you get some helpers for some missions, whom you have to issue commands to, then it becomes a sandbox, with you driving your kickass car across the awesome countryside going mission to mission, until finally you come to a point where everytime you have to fight, you summon a stage, and have to create units, manage resources, and take command, all while running around yourself to issue orders.

It was one of the final stage battles where everytime I would respawn I would run to the fight, and instantly be killed by something I couldn't even see, after consulting a guide, I was simply told to do what I was already doing, just harder. After that, I just couldn't muster the interest to go back, which is too bad, because I really want to see the ending, and hopefully reconcile the total dickishness of the Riggs character towards the love interest, but I guess I'll just have to youtube it or something.

Really, I would much rather watch this as an animated movie, with Ozzy Osbourne as the Guardian of Metal, and the principal villain being an obvious parody of David Bowie, there's a lot of amusing material for anyone that's at all a metal fan, but as a game, it's just too flawed to merit a full playthrough.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

       I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week.        While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but the original Optimus Prime mig

Naked Heat: Reviewing this book makes my brain hurt

I finished the latest book by Richard Castle a few days ago, and I've been thinking about how I want to write this review ever since. You see, Richard Castle is a rock star amongst murder mystery novelists, he struck it big with his series of Derek Storm novels, but shocked the world by killing the character at the end of the last book in the series. After that, he found inspiration in NYPD detective Kate Beckett, and based his new character, Nikki Heat, off of her. Naked Heat is the second book in the Nikki Heat series. What's so weird about that? I'm sure all three of my regular readers already know, but none of these people are real, Rick Castle and Det. Beckett are both characters on ABC's crime/drama/comedy series Castle. Haven't watched Castle? For shame, I highly recommend it, it's a perfect guilty pleasure movie, a series of one and done murder mysteries, that are fairly light hearted, with a great comedy dynamic between the characters of Castle, Becket

What It's Like To Get Pipebombed

Well, I'm going to break with my rule of not actually mentioning anything about having a pipe thrown at you, but in celebration of the 6 month anniversary, I really wanted to write it up. So, without further ado, here's what happened on my Fourth of July 2009, and the six months since: So, it's the Fourth of July, 2009, about ten-ish or so at night. Being that we live in a condo, and our homeowner's association has prohibited fireworks being let off in our complex, we decided to take a walk around the neighborhood in order to better see the fireworks everyone else was letting off. We walked straight out the front gate, got about maybe 50 feet down the street, and a dark car with it's headlights on pulled out onto the street, about a block ahead of us a man with a white shirt was walking in the same direction as us, nothing noteworthy about either of those. However, upon passing us, something was tossed out of the passenger window and bounced off my chest, upon the g