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| ..well not really. |
Dear Internet,
"Brutal
Legend" is pretty brutal, or in the very least it is when trying to
connect it to a video capture card due to PS3 issues. I was able to play some of it on the stream
earlier, but after being forced to reboot my computer, it will now no longer
even go through to my computer so I can take screenshots for illustrative use. I believe this is only a problem when it
comes to PS3 games due to some protection issues, but if Sony believes that
people should not even route their visuals through a computer no matter what,
what can I do but comply? I can do
either that or find some sort of Chinese backwards engineered device that strips
the signal apart. Who knows? In the mean time, both you and I will have to
make use of the few screenshots I made in the first session and just utilize
our imagination for the rest of the time.
"Brutal
Legend" of Tim Shafer fame, follows the roadie Eddie Riggs, voiced by Jack
Black, as he is thrown into a metal rock inspired world after he is crushed by
a giant stage prop at a concert.
Mountains of horned skulls adorn the landscape while giant guitars are
plunged neck deep in the plains between.
The world that Double Fine made is rich in the art and style that adorns
rock covers of a foregone era. I dare
not even try to attempt to categorize the various levels of musical genre and
sub-cultures that this game includes.
Trying to distinguish and separate from such genres as Classical Heavy
Metal and Folk Metal is better left to someone who has spent years listening to
such songs and can detect the subtle nuance.
Billy Joel summed it up enough for me saying "It's still rock and
roll to me."
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| Our lovable yet eccentric protagonist. |
The
songs that the game does select are not all obscure ones selected to create a
pure underground atmosphere. There are a
few that even I recognize. I think one
or two are shared with the old "Tony Hawk Pro Skater" games, but I
cannot be sure about that. There are
similarities between the two games track listings and how they handle the
music. Both create a unique vibe by
creating a playlist of licensed music that is perfectly enjoyable by
itself. I had heard that the soundtrack
was well selected and created, and I was worried that I might not enjoy Brutal
Legend and would be making a quip like "The game's soundtrack lasts longer
than the enjoyment from playing the game," but thankfully that is not the
case. A side bit about the audio: I
noticed sometimes that the character lines would completely fail to play during
some cinematics. If I was not playing
with the subtitles on, I would have missed a few crucial lines of dialog.
The
gameplay, so far, is somewhat enjoyable, if not a bit clunky and
cumbersome. When the game got released
it was sadly toted as being an action/adventure game. While it does have many elements of these two
genres, the game is much more heavily a tactical strategy game. The player controls Eddie directly with am
over the shoulder view. He can either
use a battle ax or an electric guitar that functions as short range and long
range weaponry, respectively. Add
dodging and blocking to the mix, it can be understandable that the game would
sound like an action/adventure game.
After a little while, Eddie frees a group of head banging men, with more
than a dose of comedy, and the real game begins. The player has to give orders to the other characters
like telling them to go somewhere and fight a specific enemy or stay and guard
an area. Eventually, the members of
Eddie's army begin to grow well beyond a handful. It is there that the game really begins. Soon the player is controlling 40 or more
teammates while fighting off hoards of enemies that are attempting to break
down the rock band stage that you are protecting. Basically, the game is a tower defense game
in a 3D environment.
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| When the game does place something in the middle of this world, it is done with plenty of style. |
Coming
back to the blood-soaked demonic environment for a moment, it is huge. The world is ridiculously large and requires
a vehicle to navigate it constantly, which the game thankfully gives you very
early. Even when the game shifts from
exploration to tower defense mode, the "area" is huge to the point
where trying to walk from your base to the enemy's would take much too long to warrant. The game works a clever workaround to this
predicament. Once the battlefields get
to the point where one end cannot be seen from the other, Eddie is
"cursed" with large bat wings that allow him to fly around at speeds
that make the hot rod from hell look slow in comparison. Sadly, the wings only work in tower defense segments,
and the game has yet to say exactly why only then they are active. There is an explanation as to where they come
from, but that is it. Perhaps the game
will say more as I continue.
The tower
defense matches are rather easy I must say.
I am going through the game in "Normal" difficulty, so perhaps
I should be playing on hard. What
generally happens is that I can create enough troops to the point where I
defeat all the current enemy troops on the field. Then I spend a minute or two looking for the
one or two obscure enemies on the playfield trying to figure out what I am
supposed to do to continue the match.
Sometimes it seems the game is waiting for a specific time before
launching the next wave instead of identifying whether or not I have wiped out
all previous forces. This creates lulls
in gameplay. Sometimes it is to the
point where I lose concentration and miss when the enemy troop does arrive
because I am just waiting for it. It
does not help that the game does not explicitly give you win objectives for
each match. Sometimes it is to simply survive,
while other times it is to destroy the enemy's base. I found myself constantly wondering what I am
supposed to be aiming for since the game thinks it is giving enough clues. And while it is true that if you fumble long
enough you can figure it out, it makes the matches take longer because you
spend extra time figuring out what you are supposed to be doing
specifically.
This lack
of a clear goal sort of rolls into one of the bigger problems of the game. There is almost no heads-up display. This brings back one problem that I found in
"Fable III." I do not want to
go back to those entries and read them again because it was such a bad game the
first time around, so I am not sure if I made this point before. Both "Fable III" and "Brutal
Legend" make use of no health bar to indicate to the player how close they
are to dying. What both games decide to
do is take out all the color saturation on the screen and add a growing red boarder
on the edges of the screen. This is a
horrible concept because the player has no concrete idea as to how close they
are to being dead. When they are
playing, they are asking themselves, "Can the screen get redder?" The only way they can know if they are in
real trouble is by allowing themselves to die to know at what point they should
be concerned when the effects trigger. Looking
at a screen going red is subjective to the interpretations of the player and
silly since the health points of the characters are objective and number
based. You can argue about how red a
color can be, but you cannot argue about how two out of a hundred is close to
nothing.
I will
stop for now, Internet. There are a few
other things that I will cover in subsequent entries that I do not want to talk
about until I am deeper in the game.
Until then, keep headbanging.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
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