Brutal Legend Review

Born to be Free Roaming

There’s more to the game than just the huge Stage Battles and one-shot recruitment missions, though admittedly not much of it is as unique and deserving of awe as the main body of Brütal Legend’s fiction.

In fact, it’s your fairly basic and predictable slew of activities, to be perfectly honest. There are collectibles scattered across the landscape like the knocked out teeth of one of the game’s titans, for the most part being comprised of Dragon Statues and look-out points.

The look-out points are fairly self-explanatory; remnants of the world’s previous rock-god inhabitants that you can use to get a unique perspective on the area. Wander up to one when you’re off-mission and you’ll be treated to a specially selected look at the immediate landscape, which is usually a direct reference to one classic album cover or other.

The Dragon Statues are more central to the gameplay, again explained as relics from when rock gods walked the earth. The statues have been bound and ball-gagged by Doviculus’s hordes though, and by releasing their granite wings with a blast on your guitar you can you can earn the gods’ favour.


That favour isn’t as immediately useful as you’d hope a divine boon to be – just a bunch of hands that spring from the bottom of the screen clutching lighters. Collect enough of them though and you can pop down into the metal forge and trade your fire tributes in with Ozzy Osbourne, who crystallises out of a lava flow and introduces himself as “the guardian of fu**ing metal, man!”

Ozzy himself is just one of a slew of celebrity voiceovers linked to the game, with Jack Black taking the role of Eddie Riggs and Rob Halford appearing as Lars. Oh, and Lemmy Kilmister gives voice to the Killmaster’s slurred ambivalences as Ironheade’s medic too. And Lita Ford as his Lars’ sister too. And, um, Tim Curry? Whatever, the point is that there are a lot of notable people signed up for Brütal Legend and, no matter your thoughts on celebrity voiceovers, they all fit the bill perfectly. That goes double for Jack Black too, whose exuberant style was honestly starting to grate on us in some of his recent films but he fits in here like a finely-laid bass line.


It’s to Double Fine’s credit that none of these rock personalities ever get as annoying as they could potentially be too. We all love Ozzy Osbourne for example, but his incoherent nonsense mumbling can quickly turn from hilarious novelty into just another tired old meme if it’s pushed to overexposure – but Brütal Legend never does. By positioning Ozzy as a divine shopkeeper who sells you new moves and upgrades for your car, Double Fine stops the jokes from running too flat, too soon. There’s simply no option to over indulge.

Unfortunately though, the same isn’t entirely true for the optional quests that you can find littered across the mountain wasteland, which tend to be incredibly predictable and get tired faster that an anaemic grandfather at a rave. There’s the standard turret defence quest, the standard combat quest and a bunch of slowly-unlocked missions where you race against a speed demon (unfortunately, not Glottis).

All of them will be immediately familiar and the game does sacrifice some of its sense of invention in keeping the sidequests so mired in the usual gameplay tropes. There are some more unique missions too obviously, but because the banal is the exception rather than the norm for Brütal Legend, it’s these which end up standing out.