Brutal Legend Key Points: Good: Awesome Graphics Beautiful environment-Very Detailed Great collection of metal songs for the gigantic soundtrack Entertaining Cutscenes Cool Main Menu Bad: Short Single Player Campaign Multiplayer was very confusing Backstory/Into: In Brutal Legend, you take on the role of Eddie Riggs, a roadie of a poser band, who gets treated like he's not worth but two cents. Another drudging concert is going on for Eddie, who is disgusted by their music, a mixture of pop and metal. During the concert, a band member climbs on a loose piece of the set, it breaks, and he is left dangling there, with no way to get up. Eddie steps in to rescue him, and brings him to safety, but just his luck, the whole set collapses on him; leaving him unconscious. As blood trickles onto his enchanted belt, an animal from hell erupts from the Earth, destroying everything in the stadium, and bringing Eddie to an alternate world. Story Mode My first impressions of the Story mode were just jaw-dropping. Brutal Legend has amazing graphics, that are a bit cartoony, but still give the feel that you're actually in the game. As I quickly progressed through the "tutorial", I got a taste of the fighting. It was a lot better than most games of this sort. The controls are very simple, pressing A to slash with your Axe, and X to control your Guitar's attacks. With different ways that the enemies died; such as being decapitated and having their legs cut off; the fighting scenes were always fun. A feature that I thought was actually good to have, was that the Guitar became "Overheated" when you overused it, to prevent you from sitting there and unloading with your Guitar from a far distance. The next major thing in the story mode, was the use of "Solos". There were many different solos that you can unlock throughout the story, and compose of Eddie playing an awesome guitar solo, while you press the corresponding buttons on the screen. These spells did things from melting your enemies faces off, to summoning your chariot, the Duece (AKA The Druid Plow). The driving in this game was very entertaining, you can free-roam the whole world in your car, and access the metal forge; where you upgrade your arsenal of weapons and your car; splatter creatures, and complete side-missions. Side missions got boring very quickly, as they were usually the same thing each time, but it was good for a break from the story at times. The story continued on as you slayed monsters, completed quests, fought bosses, and eventually saved the world in which you were dropped into. Multiplayer Well, there are a lot of things to go over about Brutal Legend's multiplayer mode. My first impressions of the multiplayer mode; called Stage Battle; was just utter confusion. Even after watching the tutorial video, the mode was very confusing to me. After a little bit of messing around, I figured out how to play, and completed a first game against the AI. The way I would explain this mode, is like a First-Person command and conquer game. You build up your army by "spending" fans, and then attack certain posts that you can build merchant booths on, to get more fans. Eventually you get closer to your enemy, wipe out their resources, and then destroy them. I didn't find the multiplayer mode satisfying, as it wasn't very fun for me to play. Other Some other things about this game that I loved that didn't fit in those categories. First of all, the soundtrack was by-far the best soundtrack for a game, ever, if you enjoy metal music that is. It contains everything from Black Sabbath and Slayer to Motorhead and Anthrax. Also, the game's menu was visually pleasing, as it was a record and case, and had a different option on each part of the record and case. The graphics for the game were awesome, and the environment was very metal-inspired. Recommend? I would definitely recommend this game to everyone. It's a really fun and relaxed game, with a great fighting system, Story, and Storyline. There aren't very many flaws in my opinion, unless you don't like metal. If so, you can just turn off the music, and listen to some of your own. I suggest checking this game out, it's definitely worth it to rent it and check it out. That was my first review for a game, ever. So tell me what you thought about it and what I should improve on/cover. Thanks.
Not bad for your first gaming review, I enjoyed it. In general, stray away from saying "best ever", as that is always subjective depending on the person's tastes (like I could say the best music in a game ever was in Lost Odyssey, but besides the fact that's probably not true, if you don't appreciate classical style you wouldn't agree...I'm sure you get what I mean). You seem to push the graphics really hard, and honestly I wasn't THAT impressed by the graphics. What I was impressed by was the art direction, what kind of feel and look things are giving you. So, I wouldn't stress the graphics because honestly they weren't that great, but the art direction (I just repeated myself...bleghhh) was pretty epic. If you've heard any of the director interviews with Tim Schafer, you'll hear lots of really interesting stuff you'll see in the game. At any given point, for example, Schafer wanted you to be able to see that as the cover of a metal album. I think on that point they did a great job on making things ridiculous, but somehow fit into a almost believable world. I found the combat pretty normal for this kind of hack-and-slash. The overheat is a pretty common part of these kind of games...I'm not going to hold it against your review or anything (I found the combat to be pretty fun, to be fair), but I'm just saying I wouldn't talk about it like it's a new idea. The multiplayer and elements of the single player are in RTS (Real Time Strategy) mode, games like Age of Empires, Halo Wars, Starcraft, the like are very similar. I wasn't overly impressed, however, by Brutal Legend's, personally I thought it was confusing and less than completely thought out. I agree mainly with your analysis on that, except it IS the Command and Conquer game...just not anywhere near as fun, balanced, or thought out as C&C. There's no real options other than ramming massive forces against each other, it kind of sucked, and overall was a confusing experience I tried to end as soon as I could to get back to the fun parts. Multiplayer was a little better with 3 factions, but I found that there wasn't really much of a difference, and it was just the bad parts of the campaign, online. Overall, liked your review. If it is your first one, great job...I love to be critical about reviews, and yours was pretty fairly written, though I think it focused too much on "awesome graphics" instead of what people really want to know about. Also, I should mention that opening screens and such are kind of pointless, I wouldn't bother to include that except maybe mentioning it offhand. It is kind of neat, but not something I could care for one way or the other if I'm trying to make a decision on buy/rent/pass on the game.
Alright, thanks for telling me. I understood what you're saying, and yeah I know I kinda went back on that too much, but it was just the 'metal' inspired part of it that really amused me.
Reviewing a review? I want to buy Brutal Legend. When I go and pick up Modern Warfare 2, then I'm getting Borderlands and Brutal Legend. Thanks for writing a review!