“Ever feel like you were born in the wrong time—like you should have been born earlier, when the music was… real?”
“Like the seventies?”
“No. Earlier… like the early seventies.”
The first few hours of Brütal Legend are pure aesthetic bliss. Beginning with an in-the-flesh appearance by none other than Jack Black, and followed by in-game cameos from rock legends like Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, and Ozzy Osbourne, the game delves deep into director Tim Schafer’s wild imagination, conjuring a fascinating world marked by sick guitar riffs, heavy metal fashion, grotesque demonic fiends, and brutal carnage.
It’s an era’s worth of disturbing album covers brought to cartoonish life—pin-headed freaks, reptilian beasts, barbarian warriors, goth chicks, giant stadium speakers, apocalyptic deserts, glam palaces, spiderwebs, boneyards, flames, leather, denim, nitrous, hot rod chrome. You kill your enemies by shooting lightning and fire out of a guitar, or playing blistering solos that melt their faces. There are panthers that shoot lasers out of their eyes, brutes who toss their own chain-tethered, spikey heads at you like morning stars. Fanged, fire-breathing gorillas wearing spike rivet wrist cuffs.
Neither satirical nor serious, it approaches its material with nothing less than profound admiration. It’s clear that Schafer and company believe that every outrageous quality of metal culture is totally awesome. And for large chunks of the game, that attitude is infectious, allowing the game to be both completely ridiculous and totally cool at the same time.
Propelled forward by one of the all-time great licensed game soundtracks (featuring 100+ curated songs that cover the gamut of metal subgenres, from classics to obscurities), the player takes on the role of Eddie Riggs (Black), a freshly resurrected roadie who is transported to heavy metal fantasyland where he must use a battle axe and a Flying V guitar to rally the headbanging forces of good and vanquish the diabolical agents of evil.
Are you sure you’re ready for this? Because what I hold in my hand is not just gonna blow your mind, it’s gonna blow your soul.
It’s a rollicking good time for quite a while—the video game equivalent of a mosh pit, I’d say, which was probably the entire ethos behind making it—which essentially recommends it to anyone who has a weekend to kill and an affinity for the musical genre. But after you’ve played it for a bit, the enthusiasm starts to wane pretty rapidly. It begins as a basic but coherent hack and slasher, then after a few hours shifts into a real-time strategy game. Detractors cried foul at that initial quirk, but it’s not the root issue. (The RTS sections, which become the main gameplay loop, are actually pretty decent considering the usual hiccups with attempting that genre on consoles, although they rarely feel “strategic.”) No, the real problem is that it doesn’t stop there. Instead of honing in and refining its mechanics, the game branches out all willy-nilly—a racing section here, a flying section there; an open world full of secret areas to explore, RPG elements, upgradable cars, Guitar Hero-esque minigames, and so on and so forth.
If the aesthetic is singularly captivating, the gameplay is unrefined and unintegrated. Which is basically the same complaint I had about Grasshopper Manufacture’s Lollipop Chainsaw, and I still kind of loved that game. All of this scatterbrained game design does induce a sense of pleasurable chaos (i.e. the mosh pit effect), but too many of its elements feel like sloppy placeholders that should have hit the cutting room floor but remained because the player has to do something to move the animated movie along.
Ultimately, it comes down to the charm of its art direction, outrageous characterizations, absurd storytelling tone, and playful reverence for its subject matter. For my money, the uninhibited creative enthusiasm evident in the final product outweighs the myriad shortcomings enough that the latter were worth tolerating. It may be severely flawed, but it’s utterly memorable. Then again, I’m a fan of Black Sabbath, Jack Black, and Tim Schafer, so your mileage may vary.