Legendarily Brütal

I, like every other self respecting gamer, played Psychonauts and like most of the fifteen people that played it, I loved it. I have to admit it was my first Tim Schafer game. As I’ve said in the past I’ve always been more of a console gamer so I missed all the old Lucas Arts point and click games. Though as you probably guessed from the title, this post is going to be about Tim Schafer and Double Fine’s newest game, Brütal Legend.

I’m not a huge fan of metal music, but I was still excited about this game solely because it was the next thing out of Double Fine. Sadly, I’m not so sure it lived up to Psychonauts previous greatness. The game is by no means bad, but the entire thing just feels unfinished. Well, maybe unpolished is a better word. The game is definitely complete, but there are tons of little instances of shoddy craftsmanship that I would never have expected after playing the highly polished Psychonauts. For example, often times a line of dialogue that was triggered by some in game event would get cut off by the start of a cutscene or a load zone. These situations weren’t caused by me completing the games tasks faster than the developers thought I would. Sometimes the dialogue would continue for another twenty or thirty seconds if I knew ahead of time to wait and let it finish. In one instance the Guardian of Metal was saying his goodbye quip as the game played the animation of my character exiting his lair and even then he was cut off. That means someone recorded a line that was longer than the non-interactive sequence it was intended to be played over.

This might not sound like a big deal and I guess it isn’t, but the game is full of little problems like that and it started to get to me. These guys are known for their stories and characters as much as they are for their gameplay and level design. How can you appreciate the story if important pieces are constantly being cut off?

I also ran into a decent amount of glitches, including one where my car did a U turn in mid air and then landed sideways in an impossible to drive out of location. The game must have realized its error because my car spontaneously exploded fifteen seconds later, either that or the thing I was running from finally caught up.

As far as gameplay goes, it’s actually a pretty cool and rather unique set up they created. It’s an action game that slowly turns into a simple RTS where you control what I would call a hero class while still building and managing an army. It works fairly well, but the controls for getting your army to do anything but gang up in one spot is pretty cumbersome. Also, the game goes from being painfully easy to quite difficult right before the last three RTS battles. I actually enjoyed the difficulty spike, but it was unexpected and I think probably the cause of a somewhat defensive blog post by Tim Schafer.

Luckily all the humor of a Tim Schafer game is there and amplified significantly by Jack Black and some excellent facial animations. It’s not often a game causes me to laugh out loud and this one did on multiple occasions.

Overall the game isn’t bad; it’s just not up to the caliber I’d expect from Double Fine. A few more months probably would have done the game a world of good, but after reading their post mortem I can understand a bit better why the game ended up how it did. What happened was a shame, but I guess it gives me a wonderful excuse to blame all of Brütal Legend's shortcomings on Activision, so let’s do that.