Brutal legend is Tim Schafer’s love letter to Heavy Metal and to Videogames.
The Heavy Metal love is easy to see as it permeates every facet of the game’s world, from incredibly stylised character design to the face melting soundtrack (Ohhh you played it? Yea I jacked that from the game, up yours Douche!) and the open world itself, where nothing, not even the trees and flowers, escape Tim’s meticulous heavy metal makeover.
This wonderful design aesthetic has been lovingly draped over myriad game genre’s, from button mashing brawler and open world sand box adventure, to a unique take on the RTS genre, Tim loves games and wants you to have a blast with this, regardless of what you’re into.
Some will tell you this is shoehorning and not squeezing in but they are fools richly deserving of your contempt. Try and get it all over their shoes and in their hair.
With videogames I believe the more personal the experience feels, the better, and brutal legend leads YOU in right from the start as Jack Black talks to the player, leading them into a Record Store to begin the adventure.
The originality doesn’t stop there as Schafer continues to play with videogame conventions throughout. Without revealing too much even the way swearing and violence filters are introduced is done in a surprising and very funny manner.
Additionally, the way the hunter introduces his kill tallies displays a perfectly judged level of satire as the developers take the piss out of stale gaming conventions.
Ultimately it feels like a deeply personal project, made with heart and passion by a man who clearly loves his chosen medium, it’s creator’s unique touch found in every corner, evoking thoughts of similarly lovingly crafted projects in TV such as Firefly.
The dark side to this gaming love story is the gaming community’s seeming inability to come to terms with even the slightest hint of original gameplay.
The RTS elements have been derided to the point where Schafer felt the need to write a letter explaining how to play the game.
This is a worrying indicator of the state of the games industry originality wise, if people can’t even get their heads around relatively simple new kinds of action gameplay (the RTS commands feel like inputting combo’s you see!) what hope is there that we will ever see something truly ground breaking?
Tags: Brutal Legend, Playstation 3, PS3, RTS, Tim Schafer, xbox 360
