[Allison W]

Just finished Brütal Legend (well, finished the campaign and got 100% on the single-player stats screen, but I haven't beaten it on Brütal difficulty or gotten all the achievements). It was pretty bloody great. I went in mostly thinking I was just going to get a world made out of metal album covers and face-melting guitar solos that actually melt faces and stuff and cameos by metal stars and other big names (the Guardian of Metal is Ozzie Osbourne, General Lionwhyte is voiced by Rob Halford of Judas Priest, the Kill Master is voiced by Lenny Kilmister of Motörhead, Rima is voiced by Lita Ford, and the demonic Emperor Doviculus is voiced by Tim Curry), and I got that and an actual narrative and characterization and excellent world-building and mythology with Titans and Metal Gods and introduced to a lot of great new metal too (the game's track list is just a bit over 100 songs, ranging from Black Sabbath to Marilyn Manson to KMFDM to Lita Ford to Dragonforce to Whitesnake to Cradle of Filth and on and on and on, and some pretty great more-obscure stuff too). Forgive that run-on sentence but there is quite a bit of awesome packed into this game.

The protagonist, Eddie Riggs, is a roadie who ends up transported back in time to the Age of Metal when his blood gets into the mouth of his belt buckle, which is actually an icon of the Fire Beast, Ormagöden. The "roadie" thing is fairly important, as a roadie's job is to take care of all the practical concerns in a music show, like stage-building and working with the crew. Part of this, in this game, is helping the leaders of the human resistance movement (long story), Lars and Lita Halford, assemble a metal army, and guiding that metal army in metal rebellion against metal oppressors like hair metal warlords and S&M demons (remember the mythology bit? imagine mythology describing how BDSM demons got into BDSM; that's actually in there). It turns out it's a game that's a lot like playing a D&D bard if D&D bards were awesome and didn't suck: a lot of the game mechanics involve helping and empowering allies rather than fighting all the battles yourself. One fine detail I noticed is that you don't get rewards (Fire Tributes from the Metal Gods, used to buy access to their secrets at Motor Forges raised by powerful guitar solos) for killing randomly encountered enemies yourself, but you do get rewards for encountering a battle between friendly and enemy forces and intervening to help your allies.

Some of the elements of this whole... working with and empowering others thing tripped up some of the earlier reviewers and players, who were expecting a hack-and-slash and not expecting that the game had mass battles with real-time-strategy elements. I knew what I was getting into, though, and it was fine; only two of the battles are actually that troublesome, and both have a trick to them that makes them easier.

One thing that did worry me at first was the matter of treatment of women, particularly at Lars's mention that the young men of the human resistance movement were enslaved in General Lionwhyte's mines and the young women had been taken to his Pleasure Tower (ugh). And then I ended up quite surprised by how it was actually handled in the end--early-game spoilers here, admittedly, but Eddie never has to lead a rescue mission for the young women like he expected, because a female character gets it arranged and taken care of well ahead of schedule. Instead of rescuing them, Eddie instead ends up arming them (with guns harvested from the local metal wildlife--you read that right) for the war against Lionwhyte, and before they join the Halfords' army, they've already developed their own group identity that isn't defined in terms of their relationship to male characters, including their own graffiti. Moreover--particularly if you speak to your units prior to major battles--the game actually appeared to understand that the attitude of women being seen as a resource or reward or otherwise as objects--"chicks 'n' booze 'n' stuff," to quote Lionwhyte's hair bangers--comes at the expense of the "chicks" in question.

Beyond the above, there are a couple of important female characters in the story that majorly affect the plot, including one who's absolutely critical to the backstory (not gonna say anymore, 'cause humongous spoilers). The game's track list includes women artists--not a whole truckload, but they're there, including original work for the game by Lita Ford (who also does voice acting in the game). I admit I would have loved to play a badass woman metal warrior rolling over the Brütal Land in a badass car with flame decals and chopping up metal oppressors with a badass axe, but failing that, I appreciate that the game actually treats women as people. (Well, I guess there were the scantily clad jungle amazons with the KISS-like face paint, whom Eddie remarked seemed like they looked like they must be awfully cold and at other times offered them t-shirts, but.)

It's going for like twenty bucks now. I snagged it on Steam while it was on sale for half that price. Worth every cent. If you're not a gamer, or don't want to deal with the RTS elements, or otherwise have no plan of actually playing it, look up the cutscenes, and possibly some of the missions/major battles on Youtube. Even people who don't like playing the game (see: real-time strategy elements) have described it as great to watch (and to listen to).

By the by, the ASCII code for a lowercase u with umlaut (ü) is ALT (hold) + 129. The code for a lowercase o with umlaut (ö) is ALT (hold) + 148. Make sure you have NumLock on.