Entry 049: "Brutal Legend" Pt.2 End

Dear Internet,

                "Brutal Legend" is over as far as I am concerned.  I have completed the main story and the game was unable to make me want to play it any longer than that.  There is still multiplayer mode that I have not played, which allows players to play one another in the tower defense mode.  On top of that there are sidequests that reward the player with points for upgrades, statues to raise, tablets to find which unlock music, and various other things that are hidden away.  None of these are essential or needed.  I was able to get through the whole story without any upgrades except for a few that I purchased for the ax and guitar.  There are six guitar solo moves hidden throughout the land that are special moves that aid in battle.  I found and needed one.  I played about for side quests out of the 30 or so and saw that they were mostly repeats with only location or enemy changes, so I chose not to do them.  

                There is a lot to do in "Brutal Legend," I will admit, but none of them are needed to get through the main quest.  Worse than that, the game was unable to make me want to play though them.  This is coming from a guy that is trying to get 100% in "Lego City: Undercover," a game with well over 300 collectable unlockables.   To a certain extent this might be due to the fact that I am playing "Lego City" for my own enjoyment with no entry being required for it while "Brutal Legend" is preventing me from continuing through the backlog.  However there is a glaring problem.  The various things that "Brutal Legend" has ready for the player to collect are not needed one bit.  Maybe playing on the highest difficulty would make the player search out these various goodies to help aid them, but even on mid-difficulty I breezed through the majority of the game.  The only time I had to repeat the same battle over and over again was with the second to last fight, and that was more because the game decided to throw a new enemy type into my arsenal and one in the enemy's and asked me to quickly understand the mechanic of the new type mid-battle.  The game forgot a simple lesson in game design: you do not teach in the middle of a test.  The other times when I failed a mission was when I got thrown into a new situation with little to no explanation, but I got over those much quicker once I got the mechanic down, so that is more par for the course.

                Last I wrote to you, I spoke very highly of the various elements that the game while touching upon a few less than stellar points.  I said there were some things that I wanted to wait to say, and now I can say the.  For one thing, that open world that is supposed to be filled with various things to collect feels really empty.  To a certain extent it is like looking for a needle in a haystack.  The world is huge, but rather pointlessly so.  Since the player has access to a car at any one time, traversing it can be quick, albeit annoying since there is no minimap and navigating to a waypoint by means of turn signals feels a bit broken.  There is no point in walking anywhere since you cannot jump which can leave you stuck in a hole until you summon your car three seconds later.  The only way I can detail as to why the world feels pointlessly big is comparing it to "Lego City."  In "Lego City" not only is there a huge world, but there is a sense of exploration.  There are hidden nooks and crannies everywhere that are waiting to reward the player when they find them.  The game encourages the player to get out of the vehicle to find the items scattered everywhere.  "Brutal Legend" does the complete opposite.  It highlights all the sidequests and has little to no walking exploration.  Having enemies scattered everywhere makes speed bumps that push the player away from getting out of their car to look around.  There is no stress in finding the various collectables.  At least in "Lego City" it admits that collectables are completely cosmetic, but creates a sense of excitement in the player by making the player wonder what exactly they are going to receive.

                Tim Shafer games are herald as the epitome of wit and comedy.  I played "Psychonauts," which was the game that Shafer and his studio designed right before this game.  It was funny, but never in a way that made me laugh out loud consistently.  It made me smirk constantly more than laugh uncontrollably.  That more likely has something to do with the fact that a video game can make the same joke as a movie, but requires the player to regain their concentration quicker than a movie lest the player lose the game.  The player needs to make the joke less funny or they risk having to repeat the level by losing their concentration.  I digress because "Brutal Legend" has to follow this--somewhat overblown in my opinion--legacy of Shafer being the epitome of comedy.  There is some really witty writing at the beginning of the game.  The whole segment of Eddie rescuing the headbangers from a mine got me laughing.  After about the three hour mark, there was next to nothing for the remaining of the game.  A few jokes were scattered here and there, but they definitely dropped in both quality and frequency.  The game turns dramatic and serious very quickly despite it being rather ludicrous and filled with holes.  By the end, there are a few switcheroos pulled that could not make me care at all.  They are pushed in there at the last minute to try and add some sort of backstory, yet the story as a whole lacks telling the player about those key aspects before shaking them up, so none of it really matters.  You cannot pull the rug from under a person if they were not standing there in the first place.  Apparently, there are a few ways to learn about the world from either talking to the various characters or finding those collectables I mentioned.  If the game expected me to pick up on excess information scattered outside of the main story when it was actually central information, then the game pulled a silly trick.  You do not put central information anywhere but at the center of the game.  I am still trying to figure out how Eddie knew what the Black Tears was or when it was explicitly told to the player what they were.  

                Another thing about that giant open world that I am not going to slice into the above paragraph since I am getting lazy, the car handles terribly.  I was constantly sliding around like a sugar-hyped four year old in a bouncy castle.  It reminded me sometimes of the rover in "Mass Effect."  At least that game had an excuse as to why the vehicle behaved like it was rolling around on the moon.  In "Brutal Legend," the vehicle has next to no weight to it except when it goes crashing into an enemy.  I found myself crashing into walls constantly and being forced to slowly slog away because the crash would cause the vehicle to point at an awkward angle half way up a rock.  The driving was never satisfying or all that fun.  It was just a means to get to the next mission, and something to be put up with.  There were sidequest that were races, but I completely avoided them because of how I did not like driving that car.

                Overall, "Brutal Legend" finishes as being mediocre and uninspiring.  The novelty of having a game's artistic aesthetic based around different types of rock is unique, but it quickly grows old when the game plays all its cards so quickly.  The whole premise of a real time strategy game where the player takes on the role of one of the soldiers never quite works.  The biggest problem I had with the game was not the controls as others have said, but the fact that the viewpoint from Eddie constantly restricted my perception of the playing field, hindering my understanding of how I should go about each match.  The game's biggest draw might be the huge soundtrack, but since a number of them are not available until the player finds them or progresses in the story, it limits what the player can listen to awkwardly.  Unlike the Tony Hawk games that I mentioned earlier which handled a soundtrack management perfectly by letting the player choose exactly which songs would cycle throughout, "Brutal Legend" often teases the player by never finishing a favorite song.  I have yet to hear "Through the Fire and Flames" completely because it only plays when I drive the car, and I get anywhere I need to go in under two minutes.  "Brutal Legend" is not legendary in the scope of the story, which comes across like a teenage angst drama, or gameplay, which is not all that brutal either.  

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is "The Island of Dr. Moreau" by H. G. Wells.

Entry 048: "Brutal Legend" Pt.1

..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."

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.

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