Got this game for free from Humble Bundle a couple weeks ago and I've gotta say this is a damn good game. Not a fan of RTS games but this made it tolerable and even enjoyable with simple mechanics and non-BS AI. Full of jokes and references and even people from metal and the music industry as a whole, including Lemmy from Motorhead as "Kill Master", Jack Black (the protagonist and playable character) from Tenacious D as "Eddie Riggs" and Ozzy Osbourne as the "Guardian of Metal".

Campaign: About 6-7 hours long and not difficult or challenging by any means on the Normal/"Roadie" difficulty. I'll eventually get around to doing a hard/"Brutal" playthrough and update accordingly. Some of the occurences in the storyline are cliched and overdone but it does have some unique elements in it. The sense of progression the campaign gives you however, as you unlock new powers, an upgradable car, new allies, new songs and character customisation options. There's no branching storyline so replayability isn't really in the cards.

Story - 7/10
Characters - 8.5/10
Locations/Map - 8/10

Multiplayer: Multiplayer in this game is an RTS minigame where you have to capture these glowing green points to gain "fans" which essentially act as resources. You can then use these "fans" to create units or upgrade your "stage" or base of operations. You can set per group or per unit commands and way points and control your units using what amounts to "Kill those things", "Stay Here", "Go There", and "Follow Me". Where this differs from most RTS games is that you yourself are a playable character and can fly over the battlefield using demon wings which greatly assists in setting waypoints and moving units fast. You can also use "Guitar Solos" to buff your units, debuff the enemy units, kill the enemy units or drop a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ zeppelin on them . You win by destroying the enemies stage. There are 3 options for multiplayer: online matchmaking, vs games with friends and practice vs AI. Online matchmaking is dead, so the only 2 options left are vs friends or vs AI. One person on my friends list owns this game so I have no experience in vs friends at all. Practice vs AI was OK and because I suck at RTS I can't beat anything beyond the middle-tier of difficulty.

What to do after beating the main game: Sadly, not much. There are side quests but there's only 4 variations of them except for a couple one-off missions that are entirely unique, such as clearing a cave for a family of bats or helping one of your headbangers smash by keeping the more attractive dudes away from the girl he's hitting on. Some of these are hilarious but the sidequests add maybe an extra half hour to hour to the game. The variations are:

- Ambush a group of enemies,
- Ride "The Death Rack" which basically is your car sitting on a piece of metal and either using your weapons to shoot incoming waves of enemies or directing your units to defend or attack points around you,
- Race Fletus, a guy with a striking similarity to Slippy Toad from Starfox,
- Kill X amount of animal Y to beat the hunters record.

The facial animations for the side quests (especially the ambush ones) are noticeabley off and bad and feel rushed and with nowhere the same amount of care, effort and polish the rest of the game has.

There's also collectibles in the form of buried metal, bound serpents, legends, motor forges, landmark views and lightning plug jumps. The problem with all of these is that although they are easy to collect, the game doesn't really incentivize you to go search for them nor does it give you any hints when they are near. You'll collect quite a few of the lightning plug jumps, bound serpents and motor forges from exploring between missions, but not all of them.

Pros:

+Humour
+Lots of character
+Character Depth
+Cameos from famous people involved in metal
+Jack Black did FMV for this, no matter how cringey
+FOV slider in a 3rd person game. Neato.
+Managed to hold my attention which is very difficult for single-player campaigns to do nowadays.
+Damn good, fitting soundtrack.

Neutral:

•Controls can be clunky but are rebindable.
•AI varies between idiotic and reasonable outside of RTS battles.
•Doesn't hold your hand or recommend the best ways to counter specific enemies.

Cons:

-EA published it (current EA boycott due to SW:BF2 lootboxes and 40 hours for Darth Vader and so on) Turns out Double Fine itself published this game for PC and EA only published the console versions. Hats off to Double Fine.
-60FPS cap
-Some of the textures and models aren't that HQ

Conclusion: If you like metal and/or have an understanding of metal and the people and songs included in it, this is definitely a must play. If you like light-RTS games that don't require you to thing like a Chess Grandmaster, give this a serious look. Overall score: 8.5/10. One of my favorite games to date.