Brutal Defeat

With our own Joey Davidson having published his Brutal Legend Review, and the game now officially available to the general masses, there has been a lot of debate with extremely polarizing opinions in regards to Brutal Legend's RTS elements. And as much as I want to love the complete package of Brutal Legend (I really do), I kind of fall in the camp that, if it were up to me, would have left the real-time strategy elements on the cutting room floor.

To start out, I've never been a fan of RTS video games. In fact, if I'm being honest, I've never even played StarCraft. Shocking, I know. But where as that started out as me not having a pc powerful enough to run it (I could run could Microsoft Golf, that's about it) has now turned into me avoiding it due to disliking the genre. Sure, I would like to know the story behind StarCraft, I hear it's pretty good, but I just can't get past all the required micro-managing. It's just too much of a headache. Call me a simpleton, but I like to be on the front-lines of the action, not sitting upon my high horse and directing everyone else to their doom.

It also doesn't help that figuring out how to command your troops, build merch stands, and play face-melting solos on a console controller without very detailed directions makes Brutal Legend, well, brutal to learn. You'll even be acquiring new unit types up until the very end of the game which might keep the combat fresh, but also overloads an already cluttered experience. However, compared to something like StarCraft, Brutal Legend is still considered RTS-light. Minus the drinkability. You won't be required to gather resources, fortify your defenses, or upgrade your units. But even so, I still got stressed out playing the game's "Stage Battles," having any semblance of fun fly right out the window. Disappointing, consider I absolutely loved everything about the game leading up to, and after these battles. But to get to the game's most epic confrontations and be forced to switch gears and play a genre of gaming is dislike made me roll my eyes, slump in my seat, and buckle down for roughly thirty minutes of misery.

And that's another thing; the "Stage Battles" take forever to complete. And for a game that can be beaten in under six hours, most of your time with this game will be spent on the battlefield commanding your minions. Therefore, I spent most of my time disliking the actual gameplay of Brutal Legend. Even more disappointing is that because the main "missions" of Brutal Legend are these RTS bits, there isn't much in the way of creative level design. Most of the environments are just huge, open battlefields to wage war on, not the extremely memorable levels we've come to expect from the folks at Double Fine. Sure, the overall design of Brutal Legend's world is fantastic, but don't expect anything in here to compete with the "Milkman Conspiracy" level of Psychonauts, on both a creative and humorous level of design.

But luckily for Brutal Legend; my love for Tim Schafer, Jack Black, and Heavy Metal had me pushing through the "Stage Battle" sequences to get more on the characters, their world, and the metal music that inspired them. That stuff I loved about Brutal Legend. The story was a hell of a good trip through Heavy Metal nostalgia, the cliche metal motifs and characters were hilarious, and the music, to say it as bluntly as Eddie Rigg's battle axe, rocked. But the gameplay man, it was just disappointing for this non RTS fan. So if you're being stoned by other gamers for being disappointed in the gameplay of Tim Schafer and Double Fine's latest opus, know that I'm here, sharing your sentiment.