It always seems like whenever there are a ton of great games coming out all at once, I'm usually really busy doing lots of other things, and yet I feel compelled to own them all anyway. In any event - the little gaming time I had this past weekend was divided up pretty evenly between trying my hardest to enjoy Brutal Legend, and being very pleasantly surprised by Borderlands, with a little bit of Uncharted 2 online co-op, and a tiny taste of Demon's Souls for the hell of it.
I don't quite know how to express how bummed out I am about Brutal Legend. The art direction is stupendous, and the world itself is just fantastic. I love driving around and exploring the world and seeing all the incredible stuff there is to see, and my compulsive need to seek out hidden collectibles is very well satisfied. The dialogue and cutscenes are fantastic, and even though the sidemissions are incredibly repetitive, they almost never last more than a few minutes, and the rewards generally result in neat stuff in Ozzy's Garage.
But goddamn, the stage battles completely suck all my enthusiasm out of the game. It eventually got to the point where I had completed every side mission and found every hidden thing I could possibly find, just because I wanted to play the game as much as possible without having to go through the stage battles. And, of course, the story can't progress unless you do those stage battles, and therein lay the tragedy.
I don't necessarily hate real time strategy games, I'm just not very good at them, and Brutal Legend's brief tutorials don't really help me in terms of figuring out what the hell is going on, and the game does such a terrible job of providing adequate feedback, especially when I'm on the ground trying to kill people because my army refuses to move. Once you start getting wounded, and the screen starts turning red and the heartbeat starts pounding louder, you're almost always dead, and I've yet to figure out why. Even when I try to fly away, I die. And even though I've eventually won every stage battle I've participated in, I really don't understand why, and the whole thing just feels shoddy and poorly implemented.
I have all the respect in the world for Tim Schafer; I'll play anything the man works on. But I'm starting to feel that there's more to a game than art direction and funny dialogue; ultimately, a game either succeeds or fails based on how much fun it is to play, and Brutal Legend is not very much fun at all.
Meanwhile, Borderlands is fun as hell. It starts a little slow, but once you finish the first round of missions and get a vehicle, it really starts to open up. I dinged up to level 15 pretty quickly, and have been itching to get back to it ever since. Haven't tried online co-op yet, though, since none of my real-life friends have been able to find a copy in stores.
Speaking of online co-op, I did a few levels with Gred in Uncharted 2, and while they're pretty much taken wholesale from the game, they're still a lot of fun. It really shows just how improved the combat is; the mechanics are rock-solid and it's arguably even more fun when you're shouting out positions and scrambling for cover and ammo and trying to heal each other.
Finally, more out of morbid curiousity than anything else, I tried Demon's Souls for 20 minutes yesterday. I can see why the game gets good reviews; the game is hard but it's fair, and I eventually died because I was being impatient, not because the game cheated. And then, of course, I saw where I respawned from, and saw how far I'd have to go to reclaim my lost souls, and I said "fuck this." I don't have the time or the masochistic tendencies to really put it through its paces.
Tonight: Forza 3.
And coming soon, we're going to be doing a big GAMES OF THE DECADE feature, featuring a special guest or two. Stay tuned.
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