Now, the stage battles just don’t really work out at all. I want to love them, because conceptually it’s a riot. You put up a stage (in 1988-stylish MTV Headbanger’s Ball time-lapse, natch), occupy merch booths to generate fans (well, resources; metal fans are barely human, after all), and churn out your own little defenders of the faith in a real time assault against the villains of the metal universe. If you’ve ever been to a proper metal festival (I have), you’ll know the formidable, occult power of merch booths (seriously), so whoever thought up this whole thing was onto something potentially totally ****ing awesome and totally ****ing metal. Then it seems that person stopped thinking altogether, because in execution, the stage battles are a nightmare of hair metal proportions – all the best ideas in the world won’t make up for a control scheme and interface that’s worse than a Mr Big reunion tour.
Issuing complex individual unit orders is clumsy and time consuming. In a mode where quick thinking and quick action should be of singular importance, there’s no such thing as quick action. Because you have only a single beacon to designate objectives, sending units to multiple locations simultaneously is almost impossible. And once you’ve placed that beacon, units will rush headlong into it, single-mindedly pursuing whatever it is they think they’re supposed to be doing while remaining blithely indifferent to anyone trying to murder them in the meantime. There’s no minimap or proper command HUD, so there’s also no way to see what units you have in play at any time or where they are. Since you need to be in your target units’ vicinity to give them orders, you have to waste time actually looking around for them first. When the ground is a heaving, tumultuous heap of thunder clouds, meat chunks, and gargantuan lumbering things that clip through a quarter square mile of terrain, looking for your guys isn’t really a viable option. There’s just so much going wrong here. It’s probably not enough to ruin the game, but it’s definitely a chore. And chores, man, are totally not ****ing metal.
When you’re not bashing stuff, driving over stuff, or shouting at stuff for not working, there’s a heap of stuff to collect. I do mean heap. On top of solos, vistas, legends, Motor Forges, jumps, songs, and landmarks, there are 120 bound serpents stashed around the place. That’s about 80 serpents of overkill. I mean, I get that overkill’s kinda totally ****ing metal, but it’s also a colossal pain in the Dragonforce. There’s also a multiplayer mode, but since the multiplayer mode is the stage battle mode, I don’t see myself doing much of that. Or any of that.
And so, in the words of Cradle of Filth:
I was born with a birthmark of cinders
Debris cast from the stars and Mother
A ring of bright slaughter, I spat in the waters
Of life that ran slick from the stab wounds in Her
It doesn’t really make any sense in context, but by Odin, it’s totally ****ing metal. And for the most part, the game’s totally ****ing metal too.
