Brutal Legend - 20/20 hours

I thought I was going to write a post all about Brutal Legend's RTS mechanics, but it turns out there's not a lot to say - they're not very good, but they also have the virtue of not being very difficult. You build "merch booths" and attract "fans," which act as your currency for building units. The goal is to control the fan geysers to produced more units and overwhelm your enemy.

The units themselves have some pretty fun designs. My favorite is the Drowning Doom faction. All of their units have this creepy goth look that really adds a lot of character to your battles against them. Unfortunately, the RTS controls aren't very precise, at least for someone as unskilled as me, it all boils down to pointing your units at the enemy and hoping for the best.

But in the end, those hopes were completely justified, and I managed to beat the game. That covers a lot of sins. Sadly, what it doesn't cover is the weak writing in the second half of the game.

Or, rather, I should say that the second half of the game suffers for being the second half and not for being the middle third. Eddie Riggs has a falling out with his love interest and she runs away and becomes this sexy goth sorceress who uses what she learned from Eddie against him, summoning a massive undead horde with the power of a slightly different subgenre of metal. This proves to be a huge distraction from fighting their true enemy, the demon Emperor Doviculus.

The way the story should have gone is that Eddie and Ophelia should have reconciled and joined forces, either right before or right after Doviculus raises the stakes. This would have set up a series of missions where you fought the Tainted Coil, giving each of the game's three multiplayer faction a turn in the spotlight.

What actually happens is that Doviculus kind of just crashes the climax to Ophelia's story, barging in after the big final battle with the Drowning Doom and immediately pushing you into a lamer, less difficult battle with a small fraction of the Tainted Coil's units. And that is the one and only time you face that faction in the single-player game. Ordinarily, it would be nitpicking to claim that a game doesn't have an entire plot, but in this case, the Tainted Coil missions are so conspicuous in their absence that it has to be a sign of problems during the production.

Overall, though, I'm happy with the game we got. Its heady blend of humor, semi-ironic adolescent machismo, and cyclopean scale is not something that I've ever seen duplicated. Still, one of these days, I'd love to play a Double Fine game that is as good at the end as it was as the beginning.