One great feature in Brütal Legend is that at the end of every mission you are given the chance to go and upgrade or explore the world or do sidemissions before the next part of the main mission no matter how storyline vital that mission is.
You have 2 weapons: your Axe of Pure Awesomeness, and your Guitar. The Guitar can be used to hit the enemy with lightning or shoot an enemy into the air with a firebomb detonating from under them. You can also use the Guitar to summon your car, melt the faces of your enemy within range that have faces and don't have face protection, make a rally point which automatically orders new troops to come to that location in Stage battle (more information on stage battle further down), and much much more.
Your axe is your main damage dealer and is for close quarter fighting, whereas your guitar is mid-long range attacking and also stuns the targeted enemy for about half a second-1 second if used enough on the target.
There is plenty of after game completion stuff to do. For example:
- You can go around the world looking for serpent statues. 10 serpent statues will give you a stats bonus like: health increase, health regeneration increase, guitar strings cooling down quicker.
- Looking for Ormagoden Orbs which reveal more story behind ormagoden God Of Metal.
- And many other statues/relics you can find
There are also plenty of side missions to do: ambushes on enemy, riding the Death Rack to rain death upon your enemy, races, helping cannon targeting, and the occasional unique sidequest. You can only do each sidemission once but they are there for the entire game even if you decide not to do it when it first becomes available to you.
Another great feature is that while you are driving between missions or exploring or just running over random animals for fun and to see some guts/blood (this can be turned off in the games settings in the options menu) you can listen to different metal/rock songs that you unlock through finding statues and progressing through the game.
There are multiple animals for you to stun and then mount. Mounts can be used to travel or fight with instead of using your car; although when you use animals as a mount you don't get to use your music player until you use your car again. There are still random songs in certain areas so you don’t have to worry about having nothing to listen to while riding a mount other than your car.
And if you are bored of playing by yourself beating up defenceless animals (or bored of getting beaten up by animals) you can go to online mode and play stage battles.
In stage battles you spawn and command your troops from the ground or from the sky. You can fight with your troops, upgrade your stage to unlock new units or upgrade certain units. In the game mode you use fan tribute as a resource. You can gain fan tribute by making a merch booth on a fan geyser. And then build an awesome army of Metal and Rock and then march on to destroy the enemy's stage.
Stage battles can be played against the computer or against real players. You also get to play stage battles throughout the campaign.
There are 3 different teams you can play as: the Iron Heades, the Coil, and the Black Tear.
The Iron Heades being variously deformed humanoids you play as through the campaign; the coil being demons, and the Black Tear being undead people who fell to the sadness of the black tear in the Black Tear Rebellion years ago.
The Coil specialize in strong units but fewer units;
The Black Tear specialize in large amounts of units and are great against infantry;
The Iron Heades are a mix of both: able to amass a fair few troops and still able to do good amount of damage.
My preference is the Iron Heades - mainly because I got to know them throughout the campaign and developed strategies.
One other type of relic that you can find and then pull out of the ground is a vehicle entrance which you can enter and it will automatically take you to the underworld. The underworld is where the titans are and where you can upgrade or paint your car, get new guitar strings (each with different unique powers) or generally upgrade your guitar, upgrade your Axe of Awesomeness, and also buy rock statues of the different people who are in the campaign. While in the underworld you meet Ozzy Osbourne who gives you your upgrades, and makes jokes. I on occasion went in and out of the underworld to see if he would make new jokes.
You can team up with your troops in stage battle mode unlocking a special ability while you are teamed with them.
Graphics. The graphics are pretty good. Extremely smooth graphics for a game in 2009.
Throughout the game I don’t remember ever seeing any glitches or faults in the graphics.
Awesome particle effects when using abilities such as: guitar lightning, firebomb, facemelter, car weapons.
Story.
The game starts off as you: Eddie Riggs, a roadie for a rockband, sent into the past into a world of rock and metal music. Where he meets the group Iron Heades and begins helping them to liberate their people from the rule of Lyonwhite.
There is a lot more to the story but I doubt I can say more without releasing spoilers.
