Brutal Legend
We have another Double Fine game! Double Fine is going to keep appearing in this series, and I have no complaints about that. They’re a studio I enjoy, and am happy to play.
But today’s review is not of Double Fine as a studio. It’s of Brutal Legend.
This seems like a good summary.
Brutal Legend is a combination action and RTS, and if that sounds odd, that’s because it is. The player plays as Eddie, a metal band roadie who, after a tragic incident involving a god, gets transported to a world of metal, where he must save humanity from demonic extinction.
To be clear, when I say a world of metal, I don’t mean a world made out of metal. I mean a metal album cover become real, where heavy metal plays as the soundtrack and undergirds the mechanics throughout. It’s a deeply creative and wonderful world. I got so much joy just out of playing in it and getting to enjoy the sheer love that clearly went into it.
Lots of love
Double Fine games have a habit of being excellently written bastions of creativity. From the world design to the characters to the dialogue, it’s always in the immersion and the sense of place that these games thrive. Brutal Legend is no exception. The dialogue and character building is excellent throughout. Coupled with fantastic voice acting, it’s easy to take a heavy metal world and its struggles seriously. There’s always going to be an element of silliness, but the writing added a note of sincerity that rounded out the world all the more.
It is silly, though.
But as with my Broken Age review, my love of the setting and the writing can’t necessarily overcome gameplay issues. With Broken Age, that objection was more with the genre as a whole; with Brutal Legend, the objection comes with the misapplication of genre.
I’ve played a lot of RTSes. My Age of Empires II review is not the only RTS in this series, nor is the single game in that playthrough representative of the time I’ve spent on the genre. I enjoy RTSes, and I look forward to playing more. Brutal Legend has significant RTS elements, but is not itself an RTS. Its grand battle mechanics are RTSes, with Eddie controlling squads of troops and directing them to attack particular targets while he participates or observes. On the surface, it’s the core RTS experience, but as I played it, what was missing stuck out, and made it so much clearer how much it wasn’t an effective RTS.
Controls are sticky, relying on me staring at an objective and pointing. In a fast-paced battle environment where I am as much a participant as a tactician, this can make things messy and complex in a way that doesn’t necessarily benefit the mechanics. The lack of a minimap, too, makes it difficult to figure out what’s going on at any given location. Other than an icon showing when a squad is in trouble, it’s difficult to know when a flank is about to fall, or where an enemy is coming from. The absolute chaos makes effectively managing a battle nearly impossible, and more often than not, I found myself brute forcing my way through, hacking and smashing and spamming summons rather than having any idea of strategy or tactics. It works, but it misses the point.
Coupled with the poor RTS mechanics are side quests, most of which also rely on those RTS mechanics. When the main mechanic of the game is a slog to get through, I found myself skipping most sidequests rather than bothering with an optional slog. A significant portion of the game’s content was just ignored because I didn’t want the headache of the mechanics.
All this might make it seem like Brutal Legend is not a great game. Far from it. I loved Brutal Legend, and I enjoyed much of it. With better gameplay, it would easily be one of my favourite games, just because of the sheer creativity and fun in every moment of it. However, the gameplay is too significant a flaw to overlook, and though I wholeheartedly recommend Brutal Legend, I do so with the caveat that the world is worth it, and to suffer through gameplay to get to more of that writing and the world around it.
Developer: Double Fine Productions
Genre: Action, Real Time Strategy
Year: 2009
Country: United States
Language: English
Play Time: 9 Hours