The more RTSs I play, the more I just don’t understand what their appeal is.

• Brütal Legend
  

  8 hours playtime

  13 of 59 achievements

This is an RTS. Yes, it starts off as a hack ‘n’ slash, even going so far as to give you dodge-rolling and a lock-on that targets the closest enemy rather than the one the camera is facing, but it doesn’t take more than a few missions for the game to realize that it doesn’t know how to increase difficulty without spamming enemies or making certain attacks unavoidable, yet also realizes that being set up against enemy spam and unavoidable attacks isn’t much fun, so it gives you your own base to summon units from (and you can pull up the “build units” menu-wheel at any location on the battlefield rather than having to go back to your base, which is nice). I’ll give the game credit for actually clearly stating what the units are strong against in their descriptions, but like with other RTSs I’ve played, it kinda doesn’t matter (I never really noticed the descriptions until the last couple missions); just build one of everything and you’ll be fine.

Oh, and the game is also a sandbox because, uh…GTA and The Elder Scrolls were popular. Yeah, the open world doesn’t really do anything that a mission list couldn’t do better and more ergonomically. The only things you can really do are 1) go to the main mission, 2) go to one of the side missions, or 3) go to the upgrade shop, which I only did once since there’s no fast-travel and I’d have to go all the way there, then go all the way back when I’m done.

My biggest issue with the game is that it’s not just easy; it’s dull and repetitive. The game never displays your health because you have regenerating health and probably can’t even die outside of RTS missions and one driving mission, including the final boss fight (this also makes it feel sudden and unfair if you ever do die). Oh, and if you die during an RTS mission, you get revived at your base after a few seconds with no setbacks like this is the goth version of Tearaway; you don’t fail the mission unless your base is destroyed, but it takes, like, half the game before the enemies get bases of their own, so as long as you just keep building units and recklessly throwing yourself at the swarms of enemies, you’ll win. It isn’t until the final two missions of the game where you start to see that classic RTS-brand “enemy suddenly swarms you with units until you lose,” but this is where the game manages to stand out from other RTSs: rather than that happening over time, forcing you to do an early-rush to win, it happens as you clear mission objectives, meaning you have to take your time and build up your army as much as you can before you rush to clear all both your objectives in a row as quickly as possible (but again, all that strategy is only needed for the last two missions).

Speaking of those last two missions, that’s where the game decides that it’s a good time to introduce completely new things that can only be taken out in very specific ways that hasn’t at all been built-up-to at that point. In other words, riddle-based “puzzles,” except if you turn on in-game hints, the game will tell you what you have to do, but only if you wander around aimlessly for a few minutes at first.

I will say one thing: this game doesn’t have fog of war, but it does have nighttime and the final missions’ cave, which make it difficult to see anything. Seriously, this might just be the literal-darkest game I’ve ever played. There’s even one part where you go into a foggy area with characters talking about visibility, and it’s hilarious how much easier it is to see there than at nighttime in the outside levels. The worst of this is when you have to capture three wild animals to get a new unit in your army; not only do they only spawn one-at-a-time, meaning the next one can be in a spot you’ve already looked, but it’s so dark that you may not even realize where the other paths are unless you check the map (and since this is also an open world game, the other, easier-to-see paths lead outside the mission area and will cause you to forfeit if you go there). Oh, and at the end of this mission is another riddle-based puzzle, but at least this one had proper foreshadowing.

Oh, almost forgot: there are also a few driving missions where you have to kill waves of enemies attacking an escort (that also doesn’t have its health displayed); they’re okay, I guess, maybe even the best parts of the game, but there’s also only like four of them. Also, at least one has a checkpoint that may or may not refill the escort’s health completely.

So yeah, I wouldn’t recommend this one, either. If you’re a hack ‘n’ slash fan, it spams enemies and has unavoidable attacks, and if you’re an RTS fan, know that the enemy spam is more often than not triggered by cut-scenes rather than the player lacking the proper strategy, and then it’s just those enemies until the next wave. At least the soundtrack’s nice.