weker said:
random_bars said:
I don't know what you mean play it like a traditional RTS? I take it you mean just troop management with no hero fighting?
Don't get me wrong it was a great game, I just found it too short and dragged down by the RTS training half way through the game, but as I said the multiplayer is a console RTS and you know that stereotype I take it XD
By traditional RTS I mean something like Starcraft - where you're watching everything from the sky and cannot personally interact with anything, you have to do it all via your troops. In games like that, the whole skill of the game is about carefully micromanaging your troops, upgrading through tech trees, constantly strategizing and trying to out-tactic (and out-click) your opponent. In those games that's the intended playstyle, and it's supported by complex tech trees and resource management.
In Brutal Legend, however, you're not limited to watching from the sky - you can, and indeed
should, get into the battle yourself and fight against your opponent and their troops by hand. You can use the basic combat, which is weak but very quick and easy to do anywhere since you don't need any troops to use it, or you can double team with any unit to take control of them and perform a special attack which is more powerful than anything either of you could do alone. You can also use various guitar solos which have wildly different effects to change the battle in various ways and give yourself an advantage, if you pick your moment to use them well.
Consequently, the 'traditional RTS' elements are simplified to make it possible for the player to actually have time to use all the combat stuff as well. Therefore the resource gathering becomes nodes to control, the 'tech tree' is simply a three tiers of upgrades which give you access to better troops and solos, plus an upgrade for your tier 1 troops once you reach tier 3, and the unit commands affect everyone in your general area by default. And when the game is played as intended, this works perfectly well.
However, what a lot of people did is to ignore all of the combat options, ignore their axe and guitar and the double teams and guitar solos, and instead focus solely on the RTS elements: trying to play the game as though it's Starcraft, flying constantly and never participating in the battle, trying to micromanage their troops, and so on. And like any game when you cut out most of its gameplay and try to support it on only one aspect of it, that one aspect falls short because it was never meant to be used on its own, but as part of a larger whole.
That's what I mean by 'traditional RTS'. But yeah, you're absolutely right, the game IS too short and it ends very abruptly, and in general the campaign isn't really that great. However, because of the time pressures EA put on the game, the campaign ended up being pretty much a big tutorial for the multiplayer. Admittedly it isn't very good at doing that either. But still, if you can manage to struggle to understand the gameplay past the sucky, inadequate tutorials, that multiplayer really is very,
very good.
