The first thing you have to know about Brutal Legend is that it's not for everybody. Actually it's kind of strange how small the target demographic for this game is. If you're not even remotely into 80s metal, with all of its imagery and themes, there is absolutely nothing in this game that will entertain you or keep you playing. If you're a Jack Black fan, then maybe, but just maybe, you'll get a laugh or two out of the dialog. Brutal Legend is a game about music, more than anything else, and that music happens to be 80s metal. So if you like bands like Motorhead, early Slayer, Manowar, and so on, throw on some fucking spandex and give the disc a spin. If you don't like the above mentioned, don't bother.

The story is simple: you play as Eddie Riggs (Jack Black), the legendary roadie, supposedly the best one in the industry. You work for some bullshit emo screamo teenage band and in the middle of a show, the stage collapses on you as you're trying to save the band's guitarist from falling from some stage element. Eddie gets crushed by the tons of metal pipes and railings, and his blood falls on his belt buckle, which seems to summon the demon of metal, a giant chrome worm (or dragon maybe?) that kills the entire audience, and the bullshit band as well. Next thing you know, you wake up in a world which can only be described as all the Iron Maiden and Slayer album covers brought to life. There are stone monuments everywhere, giant statues, skeletons of dinosaurs, muscle car engines, exhaust pipes sticking out of the ground, and a whole lot of other stuff that just screams "this game is about METAL!!!". Shortly after you gain control over Eddie, you find out that you are the warrior from another world, meant to save this world from the oppression of the demon Doviculus and his right hand man, General Lionwhyte (Rob Halford). That's pretty much it.

The game is full of metal icons from the 80s, including Ozzy Osbourne as the Guardian of Metal, a guy you can buy upgrades for your car and weapons from, Lemmy, as the Kill Master (who actually is a healer), Lita Ford is also in there, as well as the above mentioned Rob Halford. Their voice acting is definitely top of the line, so you won't be disappointed, they sound exactly like they do in real life, and their likenesses are also reproduced well in the cartoonish style of the game.

Brutal Legend is an open world game, which means that you do not have to progress from one mission directly to the next one. You can just roam around in your pimped out hot hod called The Deuce, check out the monuments, weather effects and do side missions. See, this is where the problems start. For an open world game, there is absolutely too little to do. The game does not encourage you to explore the world at all, because there is nothing there to be found. The only thing that kept me driving around were the monuments you have to raise using a guitar solo (you trigger guitar solos using the R2 button and they come in the form of a Guitar Hero parody mini-game) to unlock new songs for the music player in your car. It's quite a big world but sadly there is nothing to do in it. You have four kinds of side missions to take on, all of which take about two minutes to complete, so the gameplay outside of the main story gets repetitive and boring after about twenty minutes. Another of Brutal Legend's problems is that the main story itself is short and if you don't bother with any side missions, or the driving around looking for shit part, you'll easily finish the game in under six hours, dying maybe once or twice on the normal difficulty setting.

The biggest problem of Brutal Legend, though, is the gameplay. The game attempts to mix the third person action game with a real-time strategy (why the hell would anyone even wanna do that?), and I'm sorry to say, but it fails miserably. The action part is decent, although there is no noticeable targeting system so fighting dudes basically means just swinging your axe in their general direction. There is a block button, which I haven't used even once, and you can also string your attacks into combos, but that just slows you down and has almost exactly the same effect as mashing the attack button. This kind of glitchy combat system is nothing new in video games, we've seen it in too many titles already. Just go forward and mash on the attack button; that will get you through the game. But this is still nothing, because the real fuck up of this game is the implementation of a real-time strategy mechanics. When on a mission that involves the your-castle-against-my-castle idea you have two options. You can either spread your demon wings and command your troops from the air, or run along with them, continuing to mash the attack button, and occasionally giving commands. The latter is not at all different from the regular gameplay. The former, however, is one of the worst designed things in video games I've seen in years. You fly around the battle field and do the regular RTS stuff: build a mine (a merch booth in this case, as your "base" is actually a stage and the battle is a "rock show"), order your dudes to attack, stand ground or follow you. You have four commands at your disposal, and that's it. The funny thing is, you don't even need these commands, because the AI controlled troops seem to do their own thing anyway. You might need to order them to defend a structure or bring down a wall from time to time, but beyond that there is really nothing you can do, so getting back on the ground and getting some kills seems like a reasonable option. I can see how all of this could work great on paper, but the execution is so poor that it completely ruins the experience. There is no mini-map, so you never know what the hell is going on, the command system doesn't really work (unless you get real close to your dudes and make sure they actually do what you order them to do), and the battles themselves are boring and frustrating, because you feel like you're not in control of anything. In the end, it is most likely that the game will win the battle for you, and you can just fly around listening to Jack Black's sometimes funny commentary.

To wrap this part up, I have to say that even though it seemed like such a good idea for a game, the end product is at most mediocre. Brutal Legend is a great example of how you can take a good idea and turn it into shit. You wanna know how that happened? The only reasonable explanation for this poor outcome goes something like this: the developers spent all the game's budget on celebrity voice acting (I think $haron Osbourne is spelled with a double $$ now) and a licensed soundtrack, so in the end they just simply couldn't afford to polish the game up and make it actually good. Brutal Legend is not even half of what it was cranked up to be, and certainly is not worth the money they're asking for.

Fortunately, there are two things that save this game from being a total failure. First, the humor. The game does not take itself seriously at all, and thank Satan for that, because if it did, it would be a fucking disaster. There actually is a good amount of humor in Brutal Legend, mostly in the form of Jack Black-style one-liners, and the entire dialog part. That's the obvious humor. There also is another kind of humor in the game, and that is how it's actually a caricature of the stereotypical heavy metal culture. If yo pick this game up you'll see how the developers make fun of metalheads by exaggerating and sometimes completely blowing everything out of proportion, making it over the top, all the way 24/7 leatherbound hot hod roarin' 'eavy fuckin' metal, mate. If you like metal, appreciate its roots and identify with the culture at least a bit, the odds are good that you'll find Brutal Legend funny and entertaining.

The second thing that saves BL from falling into the abyss of sucking is the soundtrack. Yes, it is mostly 80s metal, but I have to say the selection of songs is actually quite good and represents the genre well. It's like an overview of what happened in the heavy music circles in that decade, which works out fine. There are a couple of songs by the more modern bands included, like In Flames or Mastodon, but they seem out of place, when Ozzy's "Believer" was on just a second ago. Plus, these songs were a real pain to find. Overall it seems like the people in charge of the music knew what they were doing and picked out what they thought represents the whole metal uprising of the 1980s best. This they did well, so if you enjoy that kind of music, maybe you should give Brutal Legend a try.

Sadly, these two things seem rather small in the overall picture, and cannot make up for the emptiness and pointlessness of the game as a whole. In the end, you get a game that plays like it's unfinished, and you know there was so much more they could have done with it. But unfortunately, they didn't. Celebrities and art design don't make a game. Gameplay makes a game. In Brutal Legend the gameplay blows. And it's not even a decent blow, it's more like a two-licks-for-$10 blow...and that fuckin' blows.