Brutal Game Victory

This was like a good movie, when it's over you want more.

Brutal Legend has to be the most unique game I've played in the last few years. The heavy metal world is a treat to behold all the way through the game. The characters are humorous and memorable. The story is pretty darn good, good enough to make me want to complete the game just to see how it all ends. The game play was compelling enough that I forfeited some sleep to play till the wee hours. Overall its an experience I will not quickly forget.

My greatest disappointment with this game is how little I unlocked yet beat the game on normal skill level. I might have purchased 5-6 powers out of the fairly large list of abilities and upgrades I could have bought. Aside from not putting a weapon on my car, I think I might have been able to pull it all off with no other upgrades. So overall it's a pretty easy game.

Now lets dive into some of the more unusual game play aspects of this game. No spoilers here or anything, this is more about the broad strokes of the mismatching mechanics that compose this game. Because I don't think I've ever seen a game combine so many different play styles into the same game....on paper it would seem like a recipe of failure however in action it pulls all of it off fairly well.

Driving - Yes there is a lot of it but little of it is hard. I can't say I'm much of a driving game person but this was simple enough to be entertaining, not frustrating.

Standard action game hack n slash - Combos, hacking, ranged attacks...press a bunch of buttons and kick some ass. You do a lot of it but strangely its not really that important... you could swing your axe very little and beat this game.

Solos - You rocking out has great power to do many things in the heavy metal world. Strangely though I'm not even sure I unlocked half of the solos in the game. When you play a solo its a lot like Rock Band where you hit the notes at the right time....though not hard. This was neat and I wish they would have done more with it.

Open World (aka sandbox) - It claims it is but really its pretty linear with the illusion that its open by giving you a bunch of not really all that great side missions doted around the landscape. Reminded me of Mass Effect. You could greatly extend game play doing basically the same thing over and over.

RTS Style Concerts - The oddest design decision is the use of a very lite Real Time Strategy battle system. Where you build your army of various rockers you have picked up along the way and march them out to do battle at your "concert". At the same time generating resources from fan geysers. Generally I've found the RTS + RPG games, when attempting to combine the two, do both very poorly. Ultimately creating a poor game. Brutal Legend though manages to pull this off into something that I likely enjoyed most about this game. I also struggled on a couple of these for example one concert I fought for hours, lost, then came back to win it in 10 minutes. It ultimately was about figuring out the correct mix of units to counter the enemy units (and a couple of other things)...much like an RTS game I guess.

Boss battles - There are a few different type of boss encounters and while each of them was entertaining they certainly weren't hard or even really all that inventive. I think they could have gotten a bit more creative in this area.

Overall great game, I rarely stick it all the way through a console game. Much recommended...even if its odd as hell.