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Name: Brutal Legend

Brütal Legend is the latest long-awaited project by famed game designer Tim Schafer and his party of developers at Double Fine Productions. With a development period of 3-4 years, this game's been in the oven for quite a while. Has it been cooked to perfection, or is it overdone?

The game begins in the steel-tipped boots of Eddie Riggs, supposedly the greatest Roadie alive. He watches the band he works for begin their "metal" concert and is forced to dash onstage to save one of the members from falling from the set. As he lands safely on terra firma, and Eddie is ready to disappear back into the shadows, the elaborate decoration falls on top of him. As he lays crumpled in a mess beneath the debris, some blood trickles into the mouth of his ornate belt buckle, bringing to life the Fire Beast Ormagöden. It quickly kills the band, excites the crowd, and in a flash of screen-whitening light, throws Eddie through time to a rustic realm of Metal. Upon arriving, Eddie finds useful weapons like the double-bladed axe and his old electric guitar, Clementine, which now has the power to summon lightning and fireballs at will.

Yeah, that's the synopsis. As you can gather, Brütal Legend is a game that doesn't take itself too seriously. Humour is its watchword, and every facet of the game has been crafted with this tenet in mind. Sadly, this also means that the plot isn't very engaging, and you really don't care about these people you're meant to be liberating. The cast is made up of well-known metal icons, including Lemmy Kilmeister, Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Halford, and with protagonist Eddie Riggs played by Jack Black. Oh, and there's a bit of Tim Curry thrown in for good measure. All of the characters they play are based off their actual personalities, so they have little problem bringing fine performances to their roles, and the dialogue is well-written and oftentimes witty. While not nearly as humorous as some of Tim Schafer's past work, there are a lot of gems to be had, so expect to have some laugh-out-loud moments as the cut-scenes and chatter goes on.

Brütal Legend draws on two particular genres of gameplay - hack-and-slash and real-time strategy, and engages particularly on the former, utilising axe moves and guitar abilities to deal out axe-swinging, elementally-fortified attacks. The number of moves is adequate, and they're simple to pull off, mostly by hitting your guitar attack while in the midst of an axe combo. All of these are purchased at buildings called Motor Forges, for a currency called Fire Tributes, won from completing primary and secondary missions as well as other miscellaneous tasks. These can also be used to purchase upgrades for your vehicle which add multiple weapons and different paint jobs to it. You can also find and play a number of Solos by accessing a menu, and hitting button prompts on a stave that appears at the top of the screen. The effects vary from summoning your vehicle, rallying troops, increasing their attack power, and, messily enough, melting the faces of your enemies, killing them instantly - very useful later on in the game.

The real-time strategy segments take quite a novel approach. Each battle begins with the construction of a stage, which acts as a headquarters for your troops to spawn at. At the touch of a button, you can begin flying over the battlefield. From this viewpoint, you can summon pillars of light as beacons for your metal soldiers, who will move to or attack enemies at these locations at the touch of the d-pad. Through the single-player, you only play as Eddie Riggs' Ironheade faction, but the game's three factions feature eight unit types, and some of these can be upgraded further. This is all paid for by Fans. These are spirits that spew from gouges in the ground called Fan Geysers, and can be allotted to your total by building a Merch Booth on top of it. Only one faction can control a fan geyser at a time, so victory or defeat all comes down to controlling as many Geysers as you can for as long as possible, and amounting as many Fans as you can to create your army. There is a very restrictive population cap of forty units however, so creating the best army you are able to is usually easily and quickly done. While Fans are required to create units, you must also use them to upgrade your stage. These take an exorbitant amount of Fans, but allow you access to the most advanced forms of units available to you. The game's multiplayer mode uses this part of the game universally, with three factions to play with - Ironheade, the Drowned Doom, and the Tainted Coil, all from the single-player mode. This is the only opportunity you have to play as the latter two, and they are quite different from each other, with completely different units with different strengths and weaknesses. Matches can be very long, lasting over half an hour, so expect to encounter a lot of drop-outs while playing against the great unwashed online. This is a mode that works a lot better when playing with friends.

Brütal Legend takes place in an open, heavy metal world. There are few other ways to describe it, with giant stone edifices of guitars and other imagery dotting the landscape, with distant volcanoes spewing their contents into a multi-coloured, ever-changing sky. While too big to traverse by foot, you're able to summon the Deuce, a fully-customisable car equipped with a nitro turbo to speed you through the crests and mounds of this foreign world. It does a fine job of it, as it never takes too long to travel across the game world. Although, that may be because the overworld is actually shockingly small.

For a game that was in development for so long, it's difficult to understand why it's so short. If you ignore the side missions, the game will be finished in a less than ten hours - unheard of for an open-world game. Even with the side missions, they'll only add a handful of hours to the game, and are very repetitious. There are only so many ambushes that you can do before the combat starts to wear thin, and the same dialogue repeats as you begin each one. There are racing sections, two base-defence variations, and animal hunting missions, and while these don't suffer from the tedium as much and do remain steadily enjoyable, you always have to go ambush some "bad guys!" There are plenty of objects to find dotted around the map, such as Bound Serpents to release from captivity, Legends to learn (the genuinely-interesting history/mythology of the realm), and Vistas, scripted camera sweeps of the metal architecture, to admire.

There are various aspects of Brütal Legend that you can take, and, depending on your own interests, you may find yourself enjoying the game more than others will. For example, if you find yourself interested in Metal music, you're bound to find that you'll take a lot from the game's 100-track ensemble. If you like hack-and-slash gameplay and are interested in what the real-time strategy is offering, it's definitely worth a go. Many, however, will find that it's too short and lacks substance. It's painful to see so much potential, all let down by rough edges and seemingly lacking ambition. If it took more risks, and tried to push the boundaries a bit more, it could have been a much greater game, but the choices it made have a narrow appeal, and it's certainly not for everyone.