Why Double Fine’s heavy metal adventure Brütal Legend deserves a massive Xbox sequel

Double Fine Production’s love letter to heavy metal deserves to rock on once more!

I remember loving this game back when it first came out on October 13, 2009, on the Xbox 360. I spent hours driving around in the open world listening to Judas Priest, Motorhead, and Black Sabbath as I mowed down bad guys with my badass hot rod. Thanks to Xbox Game Pass, I can now relive those glory days and show you why Brutal Legend deserves a big Xbox Game Studios sequel.

After releasing Psychonauts in 2005, Double Fine Productions would spend the next four years working on their next big project — Brütal Legend. Brütal Legend was an action-adventure game / real-time strategy hybrid that celebrated the heavy metal music genre. It featured an art direction inspired by heavy metal album covers, characters voiced by real rockstars, and a licensed soundtrack that compiled some of the greatest hits in metal history.

There are some story spoilers for Brütal Legend beyond this point!

Brütal Legend tells the story of Eddie Riggs, the world’s greatest roadie that unfortunately works for the world’s worst heavy metal band, Kabbage Boy. After an accident during one of Kabbage Boy’s gigs claims Eddie’s life, his blood trickles onto his ornate belt buckle and causes it to summon the spirit of Ormagöden, the Eternal Fire Beast.

The Brütal Land

With a mighty earth-shattering roar, Ormagöden revives Eddie Riggs and sends him back in time to an age where the world looked like a heavy metal album cover come to life. But this Brütal Land is under the thrall of the Tainted Coil, a race of sadistic, evil demons that have enslaved humanity to do their bidding. So with his roadie skills and newfound abilities, Eddie vows to free humanity and melt demons’ faces off with his guitar along the way.

I absolutely adore the art design of Brütal Legend’s setting. It perfectly captures the larger-than-life nature of heavy metal. The starting area alone has fields covered in skyscraper-sized swords, complete with a towering Mt. Rushmore stand-in that you can customize the faces of. It features mountains made entirely of amplifiers, trees made out of spears and car exhausts, and so many more metal-inspired landmarks.

As you venture further into the game, more areas will start to opening up. These include a jungle inhabited by amazons with KISS make-up and panthers that shoot eye-lasers. You’ll traverse a swamp infested with zombie goths that skulk the wasteland. As you progress, the Tainted Coil will start to corrupt the land in retaliation to your rebellion — reddening the sky and defiling your metal monuments, wrapping them in cybergoth bondage gear. Brütal Legend’s world design is still so unique, bursting with imagination and creativity. It’s like an interactive homage to every alternative music subculture, and translates that effortless music industry coolness with confidence and style. The depth lore covering how this world came to be is impressive in its own right. There are collectibles scattered throughout the world that tell bits and pieces of the Brütal Land’s creation. From Ormagöden’s death shaping the world and giving birth to its races, how the Titans created this world’s heavy metal, to how the Tainted Coil came to despise and enslave humanity. It’s engrossing. Each piece of lore is relayed through amazing illustrations and an epic narration provided by Corey Burton (the voice of Disney’s Yen Cid and Shockwave from G1 Transformers). The world juxtaposes alien landscapes with familiar pop culture, and that extends to its colorful cast of heroes and villains.

The characters of Brütal Legend are also one of the game’s highlights. Like the corny but endearingly charismatic Lars, the battle-hardened but mistrusting Lita, and the terrifying leader of the Tainted Coil, Emperor Doviculus (voiced by the legendary Tim Curry). As mentioned earlier, there are many NPCs in the game voiced by real rockstars. These include Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osborne, The Runaway’s Lita Ford, Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, Kyle Gass from Tenacious D, and the late, great Lemmy Kilmister from Motorhead. Their appearances are brief but sweet additions that add charm and authenticity to Brütal Legend’s world. But by far, the star of the show for me was Eddie Riggs. He is an unabashed lover of heavy metal, who immediately sets about undoing the injustice of this strange land. Eddie finds his true calling in Brütal Legend, finding a spot in the limelight after a life as a thankless roadie for faux-rockers. And to top it off, Eddie’s metalhead personality is brought to life by the vocal performance of Tenacious D’s Jack Black, which is just crimson-painted icing on a glorious death metal cake.

Unfortunately, as awesome as the setting and characters are, Brütal Legend’s core gameplay had some controversial aspects that held it back from its most awesome potential. The beginning of Brütal Legend was a fun open-world action-adventure game, but then it gradually changed into a strange action-adventure / strategy hybrid. Suddenly we had to worry about resource management and building armies to take down an enemy’s stage in a literal Battle of the Bands. This shift in genres surprised and turned many people off because they felt the real-time strategy gameplay was half-baked compared to the open-world gameplay. For a long time, we all wondered why the developers never advertised these RTS segments but many years later, we would finally get an answer.

According to an interview done by NoClip with Brütal Legend’s creative director, Tim Schafer, it was originally going to be a real-time strategy game in its entirety, inspired by the likes of Warcraft and Herzog Zwei. But over time, as they worked on the single-player campaign, it gradually evolved into the action-adventure / RTS hybrid we know today. We all thought Brütal Legend was going to be an action-adventure game because Brütal Legend’s publishers (Vivendi Games and later EA) forbid Double Fine Productions from talking about the RTS elements. They did this because at the time, they felt nobody cared about real-time strategy games anymore. If anyone saw the RTS gameplay and asked questions, Double Fine Productions was ordered to change the subject and any trailers they made were to showcase the action-adventure gameplay only. The developers also considered making the RTS segments optional in the final build, but they ran out of time to do it. It’s rather unfortunate this happened because if consumers were aware of the RTS elements from the start, perhaps Brütal Legend would have had a better reception.

My own personal feelings on the gameplay are mixed. The RTS elements definitely felt subpar compared to the action-adventure mostly due to the game balance. I destroyed entire armies using the Facemelter guitar solo and only used the units to attack the buildings, so there was barely any strategy involved. The only time I had to worry about strategy was during the final boss where I had to coordinate with my army to take down multiple objectives. However, it wasn’t a deal-breaker for me because there was still plenty of open-world exploration and sidequests to accompany the RTS segments. But let’s get back to the positives of Brütal Legend, like the combat. The combat system was simple but effective — chaining melee attacks together with my guitar attacks to form satisfying combos that sent enemies flying off cliffs. And playing the guitar solos that blew my enemies up, buffed my army, or summoned bears with bear-traps for mouths. Plus running over demons in my customizable hot rod never gets old.

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