Long for the days that metal was the rockin’ sauce with awesome tunes jammed out to backdrops of ancient locales? Well get ready to rock out to the PC release of Brutal Legend! It may have taken four years, but good things come to those who wait. Or do they?

Brutal Legend starts out when a legendary roadie named Eddie Riggs, played by Jack Black of Tenacious D, is caught up in an accident that ends up with him being transported to an unnamed world inspired by metal music and lore that looks straight out of Heavy Metal. There he discovers that he has the power to kill with his guitar and has a natural ability with an axe that he finds lying around. Soon he meets a woman named Ophelia and learns that she is part of a rebellion to defeat a demon named Doviculus to free humanity from his grasp. Seeing that the resistance is tiny and needs members and supplies, Eddie lends his talents as a roadie and newly awakened warrior skills to be the group’s makeshift tactician.

This game is a weird hybrid of open-world hack-and-slash action and Real Time Strategy. The RTS sections actually take up a larger portion of the game’s main campaign though. To traverse the rather large world map, Eddie makes use of a vehicle he calls the Deuce. On the map there are some secrets that could be found if you are very diligent, or you can do one of the numerous side missions to gain fire tribute points, which can be redeemed by the Guardian of Metal, Ozzy Osbourne. The shop he runs can let you buy new combos or add abilities to the axe for use in ground combat. You can also upgrade the strings on your guitar or upgrading parts of the Deuce. If you want you can also unlock new paint jobs or Effigies for a mountainside, but those are frivolous and should be saved for last. The music selection is fantastic, featuring 107 tracks from various Metal bands like Ozzy, Motley Crue, Megadeath, Riot, and even newer ones like Tenacious D and Dragonforce. The game also has Jack Black doing a great job with Eddie’s character, and the game itself has a fair bit of decent humor and nods at Metalheads.

Things get interesting during the RTS sections. You can take to the air and set beacons to command troops to protect locations or move to areas to attack. They can also simply follow you or hold their position. Units can also be made to do tasks separately from other units by holding the appropriate button down and then directing them. You can create troops by first moving to mounds that have resources and building a merch booth on top of it. Then you can begin selecting which troops to recruit from a radial menu. In later battles you will also need to upgrade your stage to recruit more units or upgrade the units themselves to last longer and be more effective. Units types come in typical RTS fashion, with your infantry, ranged artillery, tanks, anti tank personal, anti personal, medics, and stealth units which are used for taking down structures. You can even join the battle yourself and use the Deuce. You can also play a Solo to boost your troops, kill, or obstruct the enemy. This kind of makes Eddie take on a bard role of sorts. It can feel chaotic at first, as the game does not do a good enough job telling you how its mechanics work. It will take several attempts to get a handle on how to do things, but the controls are good and it works alright. There is even a multiplayer mode for the RTS game.

As a PC port, this game is lacking in terms of it being a straight port, with almost no additions made for the new platform. This is a missed opportunity. The hi-def graphical polish is nice, with bells and whistles like altering draw distance,brightness, or depth of field. There are also options for adjusting the level of anti-aliasing, screen space ambient occlusion, shadows, and anisotropic filtering. Display options include altering the resolution, fullscreen/windowed, and vertical syncing. Despite these upgrades, this game definitely looks like it came from 2009, and it shows. The game still has the Xbox gamepad button instructions on it. The copyright screen from 2009 hasn’t been updated to reflect 2013. There are no additions to the game that it would have benefited from being on the PC platform. Things like a map feature for RTS battles, or selecting abilities and soldier recruitment via hotkeys instead of relying on a gamepad to do the work like on the console version or using the mouse to move units. And yes using a gamepad is still preferred over the keyboard, as the game was tailored for it. It’s an exercise in frustration otherwise.

For issues in the core game that still weren’t addressed in this port, no-clipping seems to be a thing that happens quite often, and there were a few occasions were you can get stuck in-between a tree or another object and be forced to reset the checkpoint. Also, there is no quick travel in the game whatsoever, so backtracking to go back and look for a side-mission or secret can be a pain. There are also performance issues with this game. Meeting the recommended requirements seems to either not be enough for a consistent framerate, or the game has issues that need to be ironed out with a patch. Double Fine is aware of these, so hopefully they get addressed soon. In conclusion, this game is decent but it needs patching and a very good build to run at an acceptable level. Despite the lack of extras to improve the game with keyboard shortcuts or tweaks like fast travel, it’s still an enjoyable title that’s only $20 USD on Steam, with sales likely not far behind.

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