So this was a game I was destined to love right? It’s a slightly tongue in cheek love letter to metal and hard rock. I played the demo and found myself chuckling away and grinning like a big kid. Turns out the full game is a pretty big disappointment

I’m going to try and make my criticisms well justified, it certainly at least deserves that.

Pros:

• The music
• The awesome homage to metal that pervades every inch of the world
• The characters & dialogue
• It’s a decent looking game with some great scale to it
• Best menu screen in any game ever
• Cameos from Ozzy, Lemmy & Halford and others.

Cons:

• The game
• Everything else

It boils down to this, the core game, you know the bit you actually control and play isn’t very good. The overworld-roam-about bits are OK, a bit sparse but good enough. The RTS bits are a badly designed mush. Now your mileage may vary, depending on how forgiving you are and how into the RTS genre you are, but I hated them. In the end I dropped the difficulty down to Gentle just get them out of the way.

Now I was thinking when I started the game, that all the METAL stuff would be enough to carry the game, enough for me to forgive the shonky gameplay. I mean how could I dislike this game!? it was like it was designed for me personally! But sadly the METAL isn’t enough. The funniest dialogue is all in the first 30 minutes (through which I was grinning and laughing, like a kid). The rest of the game barely raises a snigger.

It was by no means a terrible effort, but the game didn’t come close to doing the setting and concept justice. And for that I can’t forgive it.