“Brutal Legend,” by “Monkey Island” co-creator Tim Schafer, is a loving homage to heavy metal. Using tons of big-named talent and an awesome metal soundtrack, Schafer has definitely created another quirky classic. However, Schafer’s metal love song hits a few sour notes that keep it from reaching its full potential.

Jack Black takes center stage as Eddie Riggs, a roadie who, after a fatal accident during a concert, gets transported to a land of heavy metal. In this land, rather than play awesome music, guitars are used to heal wounds, summon lightning from the heavens and even melt off faces “Indiana Jones”-style. In this world that looks like something out of a record cover, Eddie encounters a group of rebels fighting an evil tyrant named Doviculus, played by Tim Curry. Eddie then helps this small group of rebels grow by fulfilling his duties as a roadie by gathering soldiers while meeting various characters played by real metal icons such as Ozzy Osbourne and Rob Halford.

“Brutal Legend” is a mixed bag when it comes to gameplay, with hack-n-slash, driving and Real-Time Strategy elements jumbled together. The hack-n-slash portions are a standard affair, with an ax as a primary weapon and a guitar as a secondary for long-range attacks and special, powerful attacks and summons.

In these segments, Eddie uses “fan geysers” to create “merch booths” in order to appease the souls of dead fans so they will power his “stage” so he can create more troops for battle. While Eddie does control units similar to other RTS games, he also gets involved with the troops, hacking away at enemies and defending merch booths.

While interesting, the RTS segments come with frustrations. Controlling units and defending bases while trying to get involved in battle can get a little too hectic. If players don’t think ahead early on, they could struggle later.

The RTS aspect is also the focus in the game’s online multiplayer. However, frustrations from the story mode transfer over to this mode as well, weakening the strength of replayability for the game. It also doesn’t help that the story mode is rather short if players don’t spend time traversing the large open world for somewhat repetitive extra missions, secrets and upgrades.
With all these faults, why should one bother with “Brutal Legend” at all? The game has so much character, heart and heavy metal that it makes the whole experience awesome and fun. Fans of heavy metal should definitely check out “Brutal Legend.”

All comments are moderated before being published. We will not edit your comments, but we also will not approve those that are abusive, off-topic, attack another poster or contain information we know to be libelous or false.

During peak weekday viewing times, most comments will be reviewed within six hours. For more detailed information, click here.

After submitting your comment, check below for a confirmation message.

• Your name:
• Enter text from image:
  

• Your comment:

* 300-character count. HTML formatting will not display.