10 Weirdest Genre Shifts In Video Games

10. Brutal Legend

Starting off, we have one of the most infamous genre shifts in gaming history.

Brutal Legend was marketed as a (more) metal God of War - a hack-and-slash extravaganza of melee brawls, open-world exploration and the most head-banging soundtrack in gaming history.

And to be fair, it was all of those things. For the first four hours.

Having spent the game's opening act gathering the forces of good to battle against the evil General Lionwhyte, players were stunned to realise that they wouldn't just control protagonist Eddie Riggs through the fight - they had to build structures, guide units ??? control the Jack-Black voiced hero as well.

Brutal Legend's transition from brawl-heavy action-adventure to Real Time Strategy was not well received by the gaming public, who felt they had been duped by the game's duplicitous advertising and the action-heavy opening hours. Developer Tim Schafer would later admit in an interview with Eurogamer that Vivendi, the game's publishers, refused to advertise the game as an RTS as they feared it would hurt sales.

Given Brutal Legend's notoriously poor performance at retail, it's safe to say that they would have been better off letting gamers know what they were getting into from the start.