This game is breaking sales records like mad, 4.7 million copies on day one, people were pretty excited for this game. Even some news about broken street dates and all kinds of shenanigans. I’m going to break the review into single and multiplayer because the difference is really night and day.

Single Player

[Author Note: The single player campaign is pretty hard to talk about without hitting spoilers at all I may disclose environments, but not locations, and impact of scenarios but not details of the plot, I apologize if I've said something that you would consider a spoiler]

Wow, what an experience, the action here is was totally relentless, it feels like they took the 5 good episodes of a season of 24, cut everything to do with character development, tied it to a first person shooter and shipped it. Sounds great doesn’t it? Well it’s not really.

With regards to the story it seemed like the motto here was shock the player with some very extraordinary circumstances. The background for the most part is delivered between missions through dialog played over top of a map showing where your mission is taking you, I found them forgettable for the most part. The rest of the story is delivered through the mission itself, and the banter from your commanding officer. The story itself is epic when it gets right down to it, there is a lot going on, and there certainly can be a lot of emotion to be felt there… including ‘discomfort’ which I find to be an unusual word to use when reviewing a game. This leads me to my biggest problem with this game. The entire single player experience on the normal difficulty is completely in roughly 5 hours, thats way too short, the effort to make it intense as it was tells me that it wasn’t just a toss in, but it wasn’t long enough to be of value in my opinion.

You aren’t given much of an opportunity to build a relationship with these characters so the plot as it relates to these characters doesn’t really have an impact like you’d expect. I had the same relationship to the named AI fodder as I did with plot characters, and in most cases the player character as well. That was definitely a big detractor for me, a lot of … “oh this is happening now?.. oh well” moments.

As far as gameplay goes this is more or less your standard fare first person shooter, they’ve introduced a “snap targetting” system, which essentially translates to; if you’re close to a target when you look down your sights, you’ll be on the target by the time you get there which can make for some very quick combat, but a lot of the time it feels like cheating. It actually got to the point of annoyance for me because it seemed at points that they overloaded areas with baddies beyond what I felt were their capacity. On top of that they seemed to spawn in waves from areas you may have already cleared which was sort of frustrating. Some of my favorite parts of the game are when you are asked to breach some walls with enemies behind them, you go into a “bullet-time” sequence for a few seconds when you have to scan around to shoot bad guys, while avoiding hostages and what not, very good moments for sure.

Some of the environments are original and very fun, for example, one of the missions takes you into the middle of suburbia and your moving from house to house locking things down, and various objectives in a block between restaurants pretty fast paced I think that was my favorite mission.

I would have a really hard time recommending this game to anyone like myself who primarily plays games for the single player experience. For the most part I avoid playing online with strangers, mostly because hearing kids yell into their microphones is never fun to me. It’s just too short, and kind of “meh”, but go ahead and rent it for the epic-ness that it is. definitely worth $5 for the weekend and not $60.

Mulitplayer

It wouldn’t be fair to simply discuss the single player for this game, it is clear (painfully for single player fans if you’ve read the rest of my review) that the focus of this title is the multiplayer.

I put close to 20 hours into it so far mostly into a mode called “ground wars” which is simply a mix of team deathmatch and domination game modes. The maps were solid most with some form of vertical element to them all of them were easy to pick up but usually fairly tricky to find the hot spots.

The attachment/perk carrot is still as compelling as it was in the predecessor, and they come a pretty steady pace early on so you feel like you’re succeeding even in defeat. For those who don’t know, as you level up your character and use weapons and attachments you gain access to new weapons and attachments, like a new machine gun, or one of several types of scope attachments, silencers, shotgun or grenade launchers, heartbeat monitors etc.. so you end up with lots of options when it comes to customizing your load out for each map. My personal favorite load out at the moment is to equip the bling perk (2 attachments on your primary weapon), I use the heartbeat monitor, and a silencer on my m4, and for a secondary weapon a silenced shotgun… I go sneaking around trying to shoot people in the back… very fun… with this example I hope to demonstrate that Ive customized my load out to suit my play style… I could have easily gone with sniper rifles, quick reloads, recoil reduction and what not and may depending on my mood for the day! In any case this level of customization adds so much fun to the game.

The match making isn’t great, when I was getting started I saw a full team of people less than level 5 playing against a full group of players closer to level 20… very one sided, that seems to have leveled off as there are more players playing, and it can be kind of slow to get into games, there is a fair amount of drops it seems, and usually only happens when you’ve only got 30 mins to play or something but all in all, these can be forgiven. The game lacks a ‘mute all’ button which would have made my day, I spend the first part of each round filtering out the people with crazy background noise or screaming kids… I really hate that about online console gaming. Ahhh well.

In terms of multiplayer this game is awesome, the recommendation is simple here, if you like first person shooters for online play, this is likely the game of the year for you… If you’re like me and only kind of interested in the multiplayer to play once in a while, I think you’ll still get your moneys worth out of this one, it is a good time to be sure, and probably shouldn’t be missed.

I’ve mentioned in a previous post that I would most definitely put this title in my “Game of the Year” list, I’ve also mentioned that this game is not without flaws. Where to begin!

Well the story is pretty bland, beginning as you arrive on a barren planet called Pandora on a quest to find “the vault”,  which to me is a bit of parody in and of itself considering the entire motivation of a player playing this game is to simply find more/better loot. The NPCs are either hillbillies, entrepreneur, or scientists, and each wield their own personal brand of crazy. This leads to some funny moments in dialog, and gives some motivation with regards to the quests that offer dialog, but the content isn’t what you’d call compelling, and it’s compiled with probably the worst campaign ending known to man.

Borderlands presents itself in a cell shaded style that really suits it, there isn’t much variety in the environments though. You’re pretty much limited to caves, deserts, and junk yards, and you see similar assets in all the environments. The color palette for the most part has been saturated, which really makes the green lights that are used to mark containers that may contain things your interested in such as cash, ammo or weapons really stand out. There is a downside however, whenever you hit a night time cycle, things get really hard to see, a little more pop in the textures may have gone a long way to solving that. The night cycles are relatively short though, so it amounts to little more than an annoyance. Speaking of annoyances… the game is lacking a world map, you can pull up a map of the region you’re in, but you can’t zoom out to see other areas. This becomes frustrating when you’re trying to pick the closest teleport location. The animations on the baddies in this game are pretty funny, midgets with shotguns blowing themselves over when they pull the trigger, kamikaze grenade carriers running towards you are all good for a laugh time and time again. It’s unfortunate that the same care wasn’t taken for the animation of the player characters, a raging berserker could have been pretty funny too in the coop scenario, but alas it isn’t.

I’ve mentioned that I played this title on PC, and it was the wrong choice in my opinion, the menus seem like a direct port from the console versions, I used the example before of the player invite menu where you would select the player with your mouse, then you’d have to hit ‘I’ on the keyboard, obviously this would make more sense on a controller, where it is select with the dpad, and press ‘A’ or ‘X’ for example. Or dropping an item by selecting it with your mouse then hitting spacebar, and changing items in your inventory, you click an item to highlight it, then click the slot you’d like to equip it in… all of this is very consolesque and very disappoint in my opinion.

This game is a first person shooter at it’s most fundamental, with RPG inspired mechanics,  and it is very good at it. There are really only a hand full of different types of enemies, but like in an RPG as you advance in levels, so do your enemies which means more HP to kill. What that means as that you need to be constantly upgrading your weapons and equipment to compensate for the difference. As you might have guessed, the balance here is key to this game being fun, and they absolutely nailed it. The scaling happens so well that most of the time it feels like you could get over run at any given time, it’s really great. The weapons are generated procedurally, ala Diablo, and you find them often, they scale by level and rarity, and come with all sorts of neat effects, like incendiary, corrosive or shock damage, all of which have their strengths and weaknesses,  to match the different sort of defenses you run into on certain enemies. The weapon stats break out into damage, crit damage, accuracy, things that loot whoring RPGers will be familiar with, as well as a couple stats that you would expect from an RPG of this ilk, such as fire rate, and reload rate, all of which compile to make some pretty awesome weapons. For example I found a combat rifle that fires a burst 3, but doesn’t do a ton of damage, but since it has a fast fire rate, and next to no recoil, the entire 3 burst will hit critically quickly with no down time, very effective. Crits are handled by skill as opposed to a roll based system, most enemies have a weak spot, by hitting these weak spots you score crits, so while you may have great gear, if you can’t hit the head of a humanoid you’re going to be in trouble. The more you use a weapon type the more proficient you become with it, which yields extra stat bumps as well, all the more RPGy. You also get equipment slots for a grenade modifier, you only have 1 type of grenade so you use the modifier slot to customize it, ie add one of the damage types, changing the damage value, different types of effects like having the grenade split into several more grenades or jump into the air and drop a rain of explosion down. You also have a shield slot, which changes the capacity and recharge rate on your shield. Finally you have a slot for your class modifier, to basically add perks to your character, xp bonuses for your group, and additional points into specific skills in your skill tree are pretty common for these.

To fuel the RPGedness, you select 1 of 4 players which serve as classes, each of which is equipped with a special action to help you in battle, and a relatively short skill tree to spend your skill points in as you level, to customize your character further. You can buy back your skill points to respec your character as you wish, from my experience it is pretty cheap to do so, and will often make sense to do if you go from single player to coop.

The Soldier, which acts as a healer if you can imagine that… but they are also equipped with a turret which was my main appeal to the class.

The Siren, they have the ability to phase step which makes you run super fast and does damage as she enters and exits this state, so as you might imagine, they will often run in and out of a big group of people wreaking havoc.

The Hunter, has a falcon friend that they send into battle, this class obviously works much better from range.

The Berserker, whose ability is to go into a rage and punch the hell out of things. In the end they can take a ton of punishment before going down.

Now despite the fact that there are these classes, none of them are required in your group to be successful, and all stand up pretty well on their own from what I can tell (although the hunter seemed to be the most difficult to me). You don’t need a tank, and a healer, however some of the class combinations when they come together are really awesome to watch. For an example, with a soldier spec’d as a medic and a berserker can be almost unstoppable, the berserker charges in and punches things while the soldier just stands back and pumps him full of bullets to heal him as he does. But the same can be done for any combination, I’d love to see 4 soldiers tear stuff down, would be pretty fun. The coop really shines in this game is really best experienced with a friend.

I think all of the shortcomings in this title, could be defined as a lack of polish that you’d normally find in your big budget titles like an uncharted or ratchet and clank, to pull from recent memory, and I think that all of them could have been solved with some more time. I think it’s also fair to mention that this is a first generation title, it is not uncommon for a first of its kind title to lack the polish of a proven franchise. Don’t get me wrong I’m not giving it a pass for the flaws, but I can honestly say that there is a synergy going on here that any fan of shooting or loot whoring should not miss this experience, even after finishing this game I’m motivated to play more, I want to play the other classes, I want to get more fat loot. Gearbox put out a fantastic new IP, now that the formula has been proven I expect a sequel that is given the time to get the polish that it deserves. Play this game.

Brütal Legend has been a long awaited title for fans of Tim Schafer, and fans of metal, who it may not necessarily appealed to from the media alone, is to a fan of any specific genre of game. I can honestly say that despite my research into the game pre-launch it wasn’t exactly clear to me what type of game this is, and to be honest, now that I’m finished I’m still not entirely sure.

If you’ve played the demo, what you saw was the first 15-20 minutes or so (If you sat through the video), was a unique story introduction, some decent visuals, and some very good comedic writing. You are then dropped into a brawler game with a few simple combos, and some hand holding through the first little bit, and then you are introduced into a little vehicular combat on your way to the first boss, which is more vehicular combat. My expectation coming into this was that it was going to be presented as an open world game, meaning a fairly large game play area, with missions scattered around, mostly doing brawler type missions with a couple other mission types thrown in to mix up the game play, and little collectible knick-knacks scattered around to divert you from the story. This isn’t totally off the mark, but it’s not totally on the mark either.

Scenery in the first half of the game is pretty much awesome, large stone statues fill the environment to create the metal album cover inspired world that the creators indicated all along that they were going for. Unfortunately this same passion didn’t really persist through the course of the game, with an environment lull at the half way mark with an uninspiring jungle motif, followed by a gloom and doom environment that is OK but certainly lacks the epic landmarks from the starting area, and along with them went my ambition to blindly explore them.

Unfortunately the environments weren’t the only element of this game to fall off. The story itself is also victim of this… what starts as a very unique story with genuinely funny writing almost abruptly turns into a bland hero saves the world story, with a couple twists, and none of the humor. Its not that the story is bad per sé it’s simply not as unique or funny as I was lead to believe it would be by the demo, which made it more disappointing to me than it perhaps deserves. Come in without these expectations and I’m sure it will be enjoyable to you. One of the elements of the story that I thought was executed very well was Eddie’s role as a roadie, his mantra, “a good roadie should never be seen”, is definitely carried through the story which makes it somewhat unique, however it ultimately comes back to bite it in the end and actually makes the ending to me a little less satisfying.

It didn’t occur to me until I started writing this review how brilliant the gameplay design was in this game, and how the evolution of gameplay ties into the story. As I mentioned, Brutal Legend starts out as a brawler, which makes a lot of sense as Eddie is introduced into this world alone, he quickly gains a friend in Ophelia and the game introduces the ‘co-op attack’, as you might assume the 2 characters combine to do a more powerful attack, a simple gameplay mechanic which at the time doesn’t seem all that useful, but becomes crucial later on.  You are also introduced to “Solo’s” which are essentially quick time events, that if successful act as buffs, attacks, or summons throughout the game.

The story missions progress as brawers, and the side quests are mostly races and ambush missions which are essentially a “beat all the bad guys” missions using the simple brawler mechanics you’ve used in getting to this stage of the game. As the game progresses story-wise Eddie is constantly making friends who have their own abilities and what not, and the story quests evolve into an RTS-like style of gameplay but as Tim Schafer himself will tell you, don’t try to play it like one or you’ll lose.

It is like an RTS in the sense that you have to gather resources (fans), by building constructs (merch booths) in order to create units (afore mentioned friends) to help you win a battle. You do have controls over your units, to either follow, attack, defend, or goto a predetermined location. You are given the ability to fly to sort of facilitate this, but if you simply send your units off on their own they will surely be wiped out. After you’ve assembled your army, the standard course of action is to lead your troops to the enemy, and effectively use double team attacks to take out high priority targets as needed. Certain enemies tend to be weaker to certain attacks and what not, so how you use your double teams and solos will ultimately decide how the battle will end. The solo’s are generally speaking over powered, and most conflicts can be easily resolved by hopping in your thunderhog which has a co-op stun attack, then jumping out, and using your facemelter solo to burn down most of the fodder, grabbing one of your groupies and blasting anything that remains. From that explanation I hope to convey that this gameplay element is NOT RTS in any way shape or form, its the same brawler/coop mechanics you played in the beginning its simple shown in a different light. And that is the genius behind it, the gameplay evolves into something more than just the brawler, and in doing so makes you feel like you’re doing something completely different so it doesn’t fall victim to the same repetitive nature of many open world games. The only problem is that the player isn’t really taught how to win during the process of playing the game, which can lead to some frustrating moments and repeating the same story quests over and over.

Even the side quests have certain elements of the RTS-esque gameplay woven into it, for example, when doing the turret missions there are always troops on the ground that you can control using the same attack, defend, goto commands which are necessary to keep the baddies off your turret. Similarly there are Mortar quests where you drive your deuce around and with a button you tell the cannoneer to fire on your location. Other side quest modes are the standard fare, racing, ambush, and kill X monsters quests. There are tons of knick-knacks around, I think 120 dragons, every 10 will give Eddie a buff of some kind, 15 or so dragon orb things which provides insight into the lore behind the world (and honestly some very well interesting and well presented story pieces that shouldn’t be missed), and tablets that contain new solo’s (you’d do well to find these ASAP, makes for easy wins), all of which provide “Fire Tributes” which you use to upgrade Eddie and the Duece, new buffs to your guitar and Axe for added effects, as well as new primary and secondary weapons and armor to your car, all of which makes your life easier, as well as new paint jobs and heads for your custom mount rockmore.

When it’s all said and done, I had a decent time with this game but I’d have a hard time recommending it to a casual gamer, especially this time of year with so many strong titles out or on the way. I would have a strongly different opinion if the strengths in the beginning of the story telling, humor and environments had of continued throughout the game, instead of dropping off like it did however, so I certainly wouldn’t try to talk anyone out of it. On the other hand, I would definitely suggest anyone like myself with a passion for games to give this a run through. Its really amazing how well the interweaving gameplay styles were executed and evolved along with the store. It most certainly could be used as a reference for how to take some of the tediousness out of repeating mission types in sandbox games this insight may be worth the cost alone.

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