What do you get when you mix real-time strategy, hack-and-slash action, role-playing game-style leveling, and spell casting? The answer is Brütal Legend, a game seemingly no one knows how to play. That includes its creator, Tim Schafer, who admitted that even he is constantly surprised by the new strategies players are coming up with.

This seems to imply that the game has untold depth and strategy, the two things one looks for in an RTS. Yet critical praise was muted, with complaints suggesting that its RTS elements didn’t fit, were too confusing or simply plain boring. Even I, in my otherwise glowing review of Brütal Legend, cited this element as the game’s greatest sticking point. Since its befuddling reception, Schafer has stated that Brütal Legend is not, as some would imply, an RTS: "For people who are open to new kinds of action gameplay experiences, they are in fact the core of what makes Brütal Legend a fun game experience and unlike any other."

Did Schafer backtrack in his statements after Brütal Legend’s release?

Is this a case of Schafer mixing together so many genres that no one quite knows how to approach it, or a case of broken game design where he tries to cover his tracks under the guise of suggesting that players aren’t keeping an open mind?

What Schafer says makes sense insofar as his not incorporating standard RTS controls because he didn’t want it to be played like a standard RTS. "Some people find it hard to split up the army and give individual orders to individual troops. This is kinda true, mostly because you shouldn’t be doing it!" he’s acknowledged. The game has its own unique rule set so he figured people would adapt to it, not playing it like StarCraft or Overlord but like something different, something individual. Sadly, they didn’t.