Review | Brütal Legend
Format: PS3/Xbox360 | Genre: Strategy/Adventure | Publisher: EA | Developer: Double Fine | Release date: 16/10/09 | RRP: £49.99
By Phill Cameron
For the first few hours of Brütal Legend, you are living out the metal fantasy that anyone who even approaches the music has; you’re thrown into a world of metal and heroism, tasked with overthrowing a hilariously vain leader while making friends with the metal legends that you so idolise.
Ozzy is your friend, Lemmy is your friend, Rob Halford, the list… well, the list pretty much ends there. But beyond Motorhead, Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, what more do you want? You don’t really get much more seminal than that. Add in a fun melee/magic system that can be turned into combos filled with pyrotechnic flourish, which slowly ties in to a surprisingly deep pseudo-RTS game in a similar vein to Sacrifice, and you’ve got the makings of something really quite impressive.
It works on the obvious resource of fans, who, when harnessed through building merchandise booths above them, allow you to fuel your stage and build units. These stage battles then devolve into moving from one fan pyre to the next, tearing down whatever your opponent has built before constructing a merch booth to boost your resource and build more units. It all culminates in taking down the opponent’s stage with the horde you’ve accumulated, by which point those excellent words, ‘BRUTAL VICTORY’, grace the screen.
To keep it from getting boring, you’re able to fly around the battlefield, swooping down to dispense aid when your troops need help, using a combination of axe attacks that do mostly single target damage, and guitar attacks, which shift towards hitting more than one enemy. There is a lock-on system, but it’s mostly superfluous, only really useful when you need to take out a single powerful opponent one-on-one, rather than in a big brawl.
Coupled with this is the ability to double-team with any unit in your control. Headbangers can be pulled into a mosh pit. You can jump on a Roadie’s speakers and create a feedback wave, damaging everything around you. Some of these are almost unfairly powerful, but at the same time they usually hinder the other abilities of your unit, meaning it’s a bit of give and take. Learning what to use and when is much of where the skill in muliplayer lies.
//Battle of the bands
Essentially an extended version of the single-player stage battles, the multiplayer portion of Brütal Legend has you playing with up to three other players against four on the other side. You’re all tied to one faction, be it Ironheade (Eddie Riggs’ side, the goodies), Black Tears (emos, the baddies) or The Tainted Coil (bondage/demons, the really-baddies), and each plays out in a significantly different style. You have different units, different double-team moves and an entire radial menu filled with a range of solos that are wildly different from those you mess around with in single-player. While you’re given a quick tutorial, it’s easy to get suddenly overwhelmed when you don’t stick to the side you’ve played before, which makes the inclusion of a practice mode extremely welcome.
Much like any strategy game, the skills you gain in the single-player portion are just a warm up for multiplayer. Every little mistake that would be forgiven in the main narrative of the game is suddenly a huge fuck-up, meaning that you get into the often frustrating trap of being forced onto the back foot and pressed into an inevitable defeat. There’s an obvious depth that, while it doesn’t personally appeal, is definitely the sort of thing I can see becoming successful, and if the communities stay active, it could easily blossom.
[Continues...]
