Schafer Wins…Brutality- Brutal Legend Review

Schafer fans rejoice!  Your champion has finally arrived.  Over the past year, I have had all five of my senses bombarded by the self-proclaimed “Disciples of the Tim,” trumpeting that a savior, known as Brütal Legend, was just beyond the horizon, and that I had best give it heed.  However, their gushing praise for the game’s director, Tim Schafer, was often overshadowed by the sentence structure in which the fans proclaimed their love.  It usually sounded something like this: “I really loved game X, until I got to part Y and it sort of falls apart…but the writing was good!”  My preconceived notions were peppered with excitement for a game with truly great Western story telling as well as cautious skepticism for a designer whose biggest fans had come to know Psychonauts for its impossible Meat Circus stage over its apparently clever characters and dialogue.

Brütal Legend tells the story of a middle-aged roadie who finds himself resurrected as the savior of a bizarre world, inspired by the Heavy Metal Fantasy Aesthetic, after he is killed by an elaborate stage crashing down during a concert.  Eddie meets up with a small band of misfit warriors and agrees to help them to defeat Lionwhyte, the leader of an evil army of Hair Metal rockers, and Emperor Deviculous, who is trying to enslave the human race.  The game’s strength is not so much in the overarching story, but rather in the tactics used to tell the story.  Brütal Legend forgoes the traditional hour-long cut-scene technique in favor of regular, rapid-fire story moments that pace the story alongside gameplay.   A cut-scene might only be a few seconds long, but with such short and frequent interruptions, it feels more like the player is participating in the story, rather than simply being rewarded with a tale after a mission is complete.

The writing and voice direction really is spot on.  I caught myself laughing out loud on more than one occasion, and that rarely ever happens with games.  For those shying away from the title because of Jack Black fatigue, you needn’t worry about his over-the-top acting: Brütal Legend boasts the best performance of Mr. Black’s career.  Even though, at first glance, Edy Riggs looks like an empty vessel to carry the Jack Black Rocker character that we’ve become so familiar with, the voice acting was approached with an amount of respect and professionalism as to let the characters of Brütal Legend shine in their own right.  After only a few minutes, I was able to forget all about the all-star cast of voice actors, and instead became engrossed in the rich and unique characters inhabiting their bizarre world.

At the game’s outset, the Edy Riggs is presented with a lush, open environment to explore, with plenty of wandering baddies to hack and slash into submission.  Early missions give the game a feeling reminiscent of some of my favorite hack-n-slash action RPGs; there are combos to learn, spells to cast and tons of enemies to chop.  I was having a great time playing my magical guitar to melt the faces off of my enemies and cutting limbs off with my mighty axe, until about halfway through the game when the aforementioned “part Y” emerged: slowly but surely, the game was shifting its focus away from the violent, visceral action I was enjoying and replacing it with a clunky real time strategy system.  I have to hand it to the guys at Double-Fine; they did a great job of easing me into it.  In the first few hours of the game, there were no strategy elements whatsoever, so by the time they started to introduce them, I was already hooked.   Little by little, the game adds more strategy elements and subtracts action, until eventually I was doing so much troop management and building that I lost the opportunity to join in on the action myself.