Brutal Legend is the latest project of ex-Lucas Arts stalward Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions. As the name and the cover art would suggest, this is at it's core a game about heavy metal music and the aesthetic surrounding the genre, so expect to hear plenty of wailing guitars, pounding drumbeats and high pitched vocals.
The game itself is a fairly inventive hack n' slash/RTS hybrid where you control protagonist Eddie Riggs (voiced by comedian/musician Jack Black) directly while at the same time indirectly controlling and managing an army in RTS style. It's an interesting mix and certainly bold but unfortunately it doesn't always work well with several of the later game battles becoming very difficult due to the restrictive RTS controls and the relative weakness of your main character's direct attacks.
On the aesthetic front, if you have played a Tim Schafer game before you will know roughly what to expect – a highly stylised world of bright colours and oddball characters. As mentioned earlier, at it's core this is essentially a heavy metal game and as such many of the locales are either heavily inspired by or directly lifted from several iconic album covers of the genre. It's really a striking game to look at, and somewhat loose comparisons with Double Fine's previous game, Psychonauts, are not terribly off the mark.
Special note must be made of the game's audio, which for a dedicated heavy metal fan like myself is just on another level to anything seen in gaming before. You can tell the team at Double Fine are big fans by the diversity, depth and sheer quality of the soundtrack choices sporting everything from big names (Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest) all the way through to some of the most obscure, but best artists of recent times (Mirrorthrone, Slough Feg, Brocas Helm) and everything in between, spanning several subgenres. There are a few questionable additions (KMFDM and Marilyn Manson to name a couple) which appear to have been chosen solely to add some mainstream appeal to the “FEATURING SONGS BY” list, but on the whole this soundtrack is all but perfect.
Likewise, the voice acting is out of the world featuring, to name a few, the voices of Lemmy, Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Halford, Lita Ford and Tim Curry in central roles, all of whom are excellent.
Overall, the game is certainly different to anything else you will have played – the enjoyment you get out of it is likely to be directly proportionate to how much you like metal music.
