Brutal Legend's humor, music and atmosphere make up for the mashup of game styles. A few quirks keep it from being great
As Eddie Riggs, a band roadie, you get transported back in time to the Age of Metal, where inspiration for heavy metal album covers and artwork is taken from. Bones, fire, chrome and metal make up the landscape. The people you meet are the stereotypical heavy metal archetypes such as headbangers, groupies, hair-metal dudes and so forth. This atmosphere, the humor of the characters and story, and the heavy metal soundtrack are the best parts of the game. And you didn't even need to be a heavy metal fan in the 80's to enjoy it.
The game starts off with typical action adventure roots. You have melee and ranged heavy and light attacks, and you battle on foot. Combos and "double team" moves are available to spice things up. But before long, you are also driving the Deuce, a heavy metal roadster around which is upgradable, has its own attacks and is used in a couple driving-centric missions.
But the set-piece battles of the game take on an RTS flavor as you collect resources (heavy metal fans) and build units to attack your opponent's resource generators and base of operations. However, as you command your troops, you can also drop in and fight alongside them or use your car. In fact, you are strongly encouraged to do so as your special attacks and double team abilities are essential to victory, especially in the harder difficulty levels.
The story is fairly straightforward, but where it shines is in the quality of the voice acting and humor. Having several real life legends of rock and roll playing rolls in the game adds so much to the experience. The graphics are a bit cartoony, but the art style perfectly lends itself to the game and the environmental effects can be truly spectacular at times (who wouldn't love meteor showers, swirling vortexes in the sky, and other cool effects right out of your favorite fantasy art?) Needless to say, the soundtrack is all heavy metal and perfectly suited to the game.
Where things get a little muddy is with the controls and gameplay. Sometimes the camera does wonky things that hamper you, or the controls make it difficult to accomplish what you want to do. Part of this may boil down to the game's multiple personalities between that of an action/adventure, driving, and real-time strategy game. Other little issues popped up like a map that doesn't let you set your own waypoints, critical in an open-world game. Or the lack of a minimap or stat info during battles to know where or how many of what kinds of units you had left.
In the end, Brutal Legend is a fun game to play, even if it is slightly flawed. The cool art design, atmosphere and music are what really make the game, even if you were never a huge fan of the music style. And it certainly doesn't hurt to have a legend like Tim Schaefer at the helm with his unique brand of humor.