Brütal Legend

Brütal Legend

This heavy metal crusade from the creator of Psychonauts and Grim Fandango is as overblown and hilarious as promised. Jack Black leads the sonic assault, featuring a cast of favourite Hollywood and rock ’n’ roll misfits.

With heavy metal miraculously back in vogue, publisher Electronic Arts has applied its marketing savvy here to give birth to something… memorable. How it originated we can’t even remember, but as soon as writer Tim Schafer got involved we knew it was going to be good – good and weird.

Brütal Legend tells the tale of roadie Eddie Riggs (Black) who achieves his dream of living inside a world ruled by heavy metal. In this world ‘hair metal’ (for example Bon Jovi and their ilk) is considered evil, and must be fought at all costs. Between fighting using his Flying-V guitar as a sword, and racing his hotrod named Deuce, the meat of the game is a fairly extensive real-time-strategy campaign to test your, ahem, metal.

The emphasis is on Schafer’s dark-humoured dialogue, brilliantly delivered by charismatic cameos from the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Motorhead’s Lemmy, actor Tim Curry and just about anyone else that ever wore studded leather. Schafer and his gang at Double Fine studios have lavished all kinds of side missions to extend the lasting appeal of this kooky quest. You can upgrade Eddie’s gear and the Deuce at Motor Forges using Fire Tributes, and these are scattered all across the land to encourage exploration. Some of the greatest songs in the heavy metal pantheon must be unearthed too, over 100 in fact, and these become the soundtrack to the game over time – a nice idea.

The RTS, like we said, is pretty involving, especially if you think you’re signing up to help Eddie basically bash things around with a loud ‘kerrang’. The deal is that Eddie becomes responsible for leading ruler Ironheade’s army against evil hair-metallers, with a vast array of ridiculous unit types at his command. Sure it’s never going to compete with Command & Conquer, but there is a deep enough level of strategy to explore when up against the forces of enemies ‘Drowning Doom’ and ‘Tainted Coil’. You can explore this even further in a solid 2-8 multiplayer online RTS mode.

Although hard to summarise because it's so crazily different, Brütal Legend is a monster of rock that any gamer with a sense of humour will grin through from beginning to end.

4 our of 5