Unless you count the Monkey Island games, I’ve never played a Tim Schafer game. So I wasn’t completely sure of what I was going into when I started playing this.

The demo basically confirmed that I wanted to play this game, and I bought it at launch. It was a very bad representation of the game to be honest. It was fun, for sure, but would you really expect the game, after playing through an action/beat ‘em up demo, that the game is actually an RTS? Yeah, me neither. It’s not fully RTS, and has a bunch of other gameplay elements, but the most important parts of the games are large-scale battles between 2 armies where you must gather ressources and destroy the enemy’s base. Quite different than I was expecting.

So does this travel through the land of Heavy Metal live up to the huge hype, or is it just a wanabe?

Developer: Double Fine Productions
Publisher: EA Games
Date of Release: Rocktober 13, 2009
Platforms: PS3, 360

Genre: Action RTS
Players: 1-2 (maybe more, I’m not a big online player so I didn’t check)

Looks and Sounds
The graphics are great. Technically they’re nothing special. Similar to early PS3/360 games. But the style is great. It goes for a semi-realistic cartoony style, and everything looks awesome in that aspect. The environments definitely steal the show though. They constantly said that this was based on “things you’d see on metal album covers”, and for that it definitely succeeds. Most areas in the game would make a great cover are for a metal album. From the awesome bone pile you start on to the dark foggy undergrounds of the sea of black tears, every area has style and looks great. The character design is a bit on the wacky side for certain characters, but there’s one thing for sure: they’re metal.  They go for various metal looks and hair styles (not a big fan of the Glam Rock dude though >_> he just looks lame).

The sound is another great feature here. First, the voice acting. It’s great. Really. Not being a great Jack Black fan myself, I find that his acting here is great. Sure, he sounds like Jack Black and talks like Jack Black, but he feels just right in the role of Eddie Riggs. No complaint here at all. The rest of the voice actors are great too. Ozzy is surprisingly entertaining as the Guardian of Metal, but he has almost no lines which kinda sucks. The other “celebrity” voice actors such as Lemmy Kilmister as the Kill Master, Lita Ford as Rima and Rob Halford (AKA god) as The Baron and General Lionwhyte are all very fitting. I have no complaints in that regard at all.
The soundtrack is really what steals the show here. It includes 108 metal tracks. That’s already a huge amount, but the selection itself is actually quite good. There are no songs that feel out of place or anything. Some of the songs aren’t exactly “metal” (Scorpion isn’t metal… right?), but they still don’t feel out of place. There are some strange things with the soundtrack though, namely the lack of the biggest metal band ever: Iron Maiden. Seriously. There’s a bunch of Iron Maiden references in the art, the MAIN CHARACTER’S NAME(Eddie being the Maiden’s mascot’s name, and Riggs being the last name of the mascot’s creator), the trophies/achievements(Ran to the hills?), yet not one Iron Maiden song. It’s pretty weird. There’s a few other weird omissions. But overall the soundtrack is great.

Story
You play as Eddie Riggs, the world’s most badass roadie in history. You start in a modern day “metal” show. One of the musicians does something stupid and it’s up to Eddie, being the best roadie in the business, to save him from a dangerous fall. That causes part f the badass set to fall on Eddie, killing him. Some of his blood falls on a belt-buckle of his, which summon’s badass metal god beast Ormagoden. He wreaks havoc at the show, and transports Eddie to a badass world of metal, where music can create greatness. May it be fire or lightning or vehicules, the power of metal does everything. Here he meets up with a few people, starts a rebellion against the evil emperor Deviculus. From here on out there’s plot twists and stuff about Eddie’s origins and explanations on how they meet up with various people to form an army fit to fight Deviculus.

The story is overall pretty interesting. Nothing incredible, but the writing and dialogues are really well done, creating a really fun world and great characters. The comedy is really good, having similar humor style to previous Schafer games (as far as I know). My only complaint about the story is that the game ends on a big revelation about Eddie, yet there’s no explanation or anything, it just… ends. I feel it could have had a few extra hours of gameplay just to talk about those things you learn in the end. But it was still a fun story.

Gameplay
Action, or the basic gameplay
The main gameplay is action-oriented. You have normal fighting moves, with axe slashes, the use of your guitar to shoot lightning and light enemies on fire, earthquake attacks, blocking and special moves with allies. The basic gameplay pretty much feels like a dumbed down Devil May Cry, or an old-school beat ‘em up. In addition to all that, you have various Guitar Solos, each with a special power. Most of them are used in the RTS segments, but some of them can be used in combat as well, like the facemelter, which literally makes your enemies’ faces melt off (doesn’t everyone wish they could do such an awesome solo that it melted faces? I know i do), or the relic raiser which raises gateways to the Metal Forge, or various other things like songs you can unlock, and there’s a solo to just make your car appear in front of you. Pretty useful.

The car is probably where you’ll spend most of your time in the game. Since it’s fast, you’ll use it to go to the various areas in the game, and eventually you’ll use it to traverse the whole world when you’re done with the main campaign. The car is both a means of transportation, and a weapon. As you advance through the game, various upgrades will become available in the Metal Forge, enabling you to make it faster, add more time to your turbo, put on more armor and ramming power, and add guns to it, as well as sub-weapons to add to its capabilities It can be useful in tons of situtation, and is pretty much required to find everything in the game. There are other “vehicles” in the game as well… or at least animals you can ride. Give them a nice jolt of lightning, get to them and jump on them to ride them. Similar to double team, you get new attacks when riding animals. They have really useful attacks sometimes, or are just plain awesome (black panthers shooting lasers from their eyes !_!)

And I couldn’t imagine walking from one side of the map to the other. It’s huge. Not the biggest overworld ever, of course, but just driving from the final area to the first area can take around 10 minutes(maybe more if you take a wrong turn), which is quite lenghty compared to multiple other open-world games. The game, however, features a nice function on the car, changing the flashers to tell you where you must go, so you’re never really lost. And if you DO get lost, the car comes with MUSIC, so you can switch tracks and listen to what you want. And the land not only features varied environments, but tons of things to find. A variety of side-quests (not INCREDIBLY varied, but still lots of stuff to do), finding landmarks to look at using some… thing that I don’t know how it’s called, Bound Serpents which you must burn to free them, and for each 10 you get, Ormagoden gives you a slight boost to your abilities, may it be extra health, faster regeneration, or things in relation to your crew in RTS mode. And as you traverse the world, you’ll frequently find your troops fighting enemies, which gives a sense of “there’s always something going on”, and helping them out gives you fire tributes. As do everything else I just mentioned.

Fire Tributes are given to you by the Metal Gods to bring them to the Metal Forge, where the Guardian of Metal (Ozzy) will let you upgrade your car, get new attacks, get better strings for you guitar, paint your car, sharpen your Axe or give it various properties, and get other memorabilia. This is a nice little feature where you can upgrade your character to your liking. You like using Lightning? Get those guitar chords that make the lightning stronger and gives it more range. More of an earthquake guy? There’s strings for that too. There’s not exactly as many upgrades as I was hoping.

RTS
So while a lot of the game is driving around and fighting stuff, the most “important” part of the gameplay is definitely the RTS segments, which make up most of the boss battles (though some boss battles aren’t the RTS segments). The RTS mechanics are actually pretty simplified. You have a base, and you create units. Pressing R1 gives you a selection of units, and creating them takes a certain amount of “load” as well as a number of Fans. Fans come out of Geysers and are out to see your “show”. Using a certain Guitar Solo, you build Merch Booths on the geysers, making the fans come to your show. That’s pretty much all there is to resource gathering. Some geysers have leeches attached to them so you must kill them to get access to the Fan Geyser, and opponents will also build Merch Booths to gather Fans themselves. You can destroy those and build over those as well.

The actual fighting is as simple as it gets. You can fly, moving across the board a lot faster than any other method. This will enable you to get to your troops faster to give them orders. The idea here is to get lots of Fans, target the enemy’s base as fast as possible, build an army, then mount an assault on the base. Orders are given using the D-pad. Simple enough: Up means “walf up to that shiny red spot and kill anything in the way”, Down is “Stay there and defend this spot”, Left is “Follow me” and Right is “Attack whatever I targeted and ignore everything else”. You target by holding L1 and placing the pillar of light on either a leech, an enemy Merch Booth or the enemy base. One thing to mention here is that To give orders to your troops, you have to be close to them, otherwise they won’t hear your voice and they won’t react. Flying is really useful in that case, since you can move between either separate troops or your targeting area really fast. In addition to all that, You can still use the character you’re controlling to fight, some kind of Hero unit I guess. You can play solos, fight hand-to-hand, it’s really nice to be an active part of the fight. And solos have a variety of effects. Dropping a burning Zeppelin on your enemies, the facemelter is always useful, you can prevent your opponent from flying and restrict his movements, you can prevent the opponent from recruiting units for a short time, you can place rally flags for newly-created units to get to, and various other things depending on who you’re playing as. Oh and you have Team Attacks with any unit you create, which can lead to devastation.

Though in the story you only use Eddie Riggs and his Ironheades army, in multiplayer you can also play as the Drowning Doom and the Tainted Coil. Each faction has a variety of units and different solos. Ironheades are more focused on brawn and hitting hard, as well as boosting units’ power. Drowning Doom seems to focus more on numbers and giving negative effects to enemy units. Tainted Coil has a lower enemy of basic units, but using the “double team” on them enables you to create more units and really boost your army that way. They each have a very different way of working and this definitely adds for various strategies when you bring the fight online.

(check this article on Kotaku for some extra info on the RTS segments)

Overall
This is unlike anything in the industry really. Some people compared it to Overlord, but it’s not even close to being the same. This is a really well done mix between action and RTS. While being simplified versions of both, it manages both well enough to be an interesting game. The RTS segments might seem simple, but I could see really epic battles going on.

Add to that the interesting story, the humor and the great presentation, and you have a great game in your hands. My only big complaint is the length, with the game being done in 6-8 hours, when some parts of the story could still be explored. On the other hand, there’s tons of sidequests and collectibles to find, so if you’re really into it you can at least double your gameplay time just in the single player. There’s tons of stuff to do here.

It truly is a great game and everyone should check it out. A nice tribute to metal and it might even get you interested in the genre if you aren’t already.

Pros/Cons
Pros
- Great graphics
- Great soundtrack
- Good voice-acting
- Great mix between action and RTS, especially when you get the controls right for the RTS sections
- Fun story
- Good humor
- Tons of stuff to do after the main story is done (+online if that interests you)
- IT’S METAL!

Cons
- Main story is short when it could easily have been a few hours longer
- Combat boils down to little more than simple button-mashing

The Save Factor
The game has a starting price of $60. I’d say the save factor is $50. Just wait for a very small price drop, or maybe a deal somewhere and it’s gonna be worth it. If you’re a metal head, buy it full price just because of the soundtrack and for the overall heavy metal feel and the metal references (just summon the car, stay away from enemies and that’s it, you can listen to the soundtrack… though you have to find some of the songs scattered through the game’s world, you can still enjoy a great soundtrack on the way).

jobocan Console, Games, ps3, Review, xbox 360