Jack Black has had the tendency to ruin a lot of good things in recent years, even with a successful career behind him. Who could make the offbeat humor in Napoleon Dynamite come crashing down to its knees in Nacho Libre? Or somehow botch a movie written and produced alongside Liam Lynch in the Pick of Destiny? And let's not forget the potential there could have been with Year One, although to be fair it was kind of stupid from the get-go. It's safe to say, though, that he did not hurt, but rather helped, Brutal Legend in taking it from a mediocre game into a fun one worth playing.

Brutal Legend is a game about everything. Sort of. I'm still not sure how to describe it. There's action, there's driving, there are repetitive side missions and collect-a-thons reminiscent of old PS1/Nintendo 64 platformers, and there's a very good attempt at making Real Time Strategy on consoles fun for once. I'm sure I could bend over backwards and just label the thing as "multi-genre," but a lot of games tend to do that these days anyway with them trying to outdo each other for the amount of content they can pour in and get away with.

But the one thing I can say that's the absolute truth, is that Brutal Legend rocks the fuck out. With the amount of talent they brought in to the voice acting and music, it's tough to be let down by a game that really brings a lot to the table away from general gameplay. Not only does the soundtrack have well over 100 metal tracks for players to enjoy as they play, but the surprise additions of Ozzy Osbourne, Tim Curry, Rob Halford, just so many big names have added their talent to the characters in the game, and it really shows. The amount of world building and the quality of the story and dialogue are really in here, as a Tim Schafer game has traditionally been.

You play as Eddie Riggs, a roadie who look on the sad state of the metal scene when he's all of a sudden taken to a fantasy realm where metal is law, and the world is in chaos. To help you, you carry two axes: a guitar that casts magical attacks on foes, and an actual axe for you to slice things open. Combat is fairly straight-forward. You can lock-on to enemies, block/dodge their attacks, and use combos to unleash your fury onto them. Later on, you learn to play songs on your guitar (using a pretty familiar system that is like a cross between Guitar Hero and the more recent Legend of Zelda games), which can be used to do a number of things, like attack enemies or give you a buff to your strength.

Then, out of nowhere, the game begins to introduce you to the Sandbox elements. You're given a car to drive around everywhere, but it leaves a lot to be desired. Without a real sense of direction of where you're going, it's easy to keep crashing into small rocks or not turn when you need to. The only clues you're given are a beacon of light off in the distance, and your blinkers going off when you need to turn.

While you obviously take your car to your main objective, it benefits you greatly to drive it to the side missions as well, since you later earn the ability to unlock new moves and items thanks to The Prince of Darkness (come on, you know who that is), and you need some street cred to earn it. But getting through the missions is dull work. You have the choice between "ambushing" enemies (which is really just you and some allies against a random assortment of enemies), drag racing against a slow car around a predetermined course, "defending" a point against waves of enemies (because, unless you've upgraded your car to the max, you're going to get steamrolled), and other repetitive quests. In addition, there are statues to revive and relics to raise, which are relatively easy to find and effortless to perform. There are a lot of these things to do, so it's very taxing if you're a completionist. Thankfully, you earn enough cred in the main quest to earn the more basic upgrades, so most will just do a few of them for a little extra credit.

Then, also out of nowhere, the game begins to introduce you to the Real Time Strategy elements. This is actually pretty neat, since, as mentioned earlier, previous attempts to play the genre on consoles without keyboard and mouse have been awful at best. Rather than command your troops to kill things, you kill things alongside them while micromanaging unit groups and taking control over areas of the map. Over the course of the game, there are more units that get unlocked and more abilites to use, all of which are unlocked in multiplayer, which is basically just this area of the game. There are great battles to be had here, especially the defense misison against the horde of Emos. Everyone hates Emos! Knock 'em out!

While I mentioned that driving and side-quests are very dull in an otherwise good game, there are some annoying things to deal with as well. For instance, the game has very little HUD in its gameplay. There's no way in knowing which direction you need to go without consulting your map or trying to decipher your car's blinkers. When missions start, you get a very breif reminder of what your next objective is and kind of have to take a guess if you forget unless you decide to kill yourself. You also get no status on how you're doing during RTS-style missions, and how your units are performing are left to little red circles that tell you when they're dying.

And you don't have a health meter either, or a mana meter for that matter. Taking a note from just about every game this generation, Brutal Legend follows in their footsteps by using an infinitely regenerating superhuman main character rather than spend the time to do something as simple as a health meter. The more damage you take, the more red the screen becomes. Boring. The more magic you use, the hotter your guitar gets, so it has to cool down. Not as lame, but I always thought that resource management was a key factor to RTS-style gameplay when it came to this aspect. As a result, the game is a lot easier than it should be.

Brutal Legend just seems like it's confused, like halfway through the development cycle, someone at Double Time said, "Hey, you know what would be awesome?" and everyone just went with it no matter how good or bad of an idea it was. And then they repeated that a few dozen times until Electronic Arts begged for mercy. There's no real indiction of what kind of game it wants to be other than a metal fan's wet dream, and there are enough head-scratching moments to confuse players about the game's design philosophy. This isn't really a bad thing, but after Psychonauts' spastic difficulty curve it's hard to really guess at what a Tim Schafer game will do next.

There are some other annoyances as well. Intro movies to side missions are replayed, recurring characters reuse the same five lines of dialogue over the course of the game, and the sheer jerkiness of the game's pace is very questionable at times. There are options to turn off swearing and gore, and while it's funny the first time to hear bleeping over the dialogue, it quickly becomes like an episode of The Osbournes and it gets old before it makes its welcome.

Overall, even with the flaws, Brutal Legend is an enjoyable game worth your time, if only to see how wacky Jack Black can be when he's not forced into a caveman outfit. There's a lot to see and do, the writing is funny overall, and a lot of the basic combat and RTS gameplay are fun to play. So, as it turns out, Jack Black can be involved in something that is worth everybody's time. Now let's just see how long that lasts when he plays Gulliver next year.