Brütal Legend

After the brilliant Psychonauts, I had very high hopes for Tim Schafer's next outing, the recently released Brütal Legend. It's not like it's a bad game (I played the whole thing through, afterall, and plan on trying to complete it on the brutal difficulty setting), but after everything that was in Psychonauts, this one felt a little shallow.

You can still see it's a Schafer game. It's got his humour and quirky characters all over it. It also does the same thing as Psychonauts by disguising itself as one thing but delivering something else - I'm not sure how clever that is from the marketing perspective. Psychonauts appears a generic platformer that was actually a witting and engaging game. Brütal Legend disguises itself as a fairly mindless hack-and-slash that suddenly morphs itself into a real-time strategy game.

It's going to be interesting how this gets received. Fans attracted to a heavy metal themed hack-and-slash staring Jack Black may react rather negatively when they find themselves having to construct and organize siege weapons to attack the enemy stronghold. By the same token, RTS fans will likely be put off by the games shallow exterior, and depth of the RTS mode certainly doesn't compare to the more popular games out there in the genre anyway. There is a multiplayer mode that is just one-on-one RTS battles. I really can't see who will be playing this on-line a few months from now ... hard core Jack Black fans?

For myself, I'm not a hard core RTSer (the last RTS I played right through was StarCraft years ago) but I did enjoy the battles in this game. I certainly enjoyed it more than grinding through the repetitive side missions this game provides. That said, I know there isn't enough there to keep me interested for too long.

But perhaps I'm getting too down on it. It's fun, funny, and original - more than can be said for most games. The characters are well voiced and animated - even Ozzy Osborne as the "Guardian of Metal" whom you get to buy your upgrades from. The heavy metal themed world and creature design are certainly inspired, and there is enough depth in the RTS battles to keep me engaged without being overwhelmed. Overall, a fun time.