Publisher EA
Developer Double Fine Productions
Platforms 360 | PS3
Release date 13 October 2009
Genre Action adventure

I’m a pretty serious metalhead. You know, the sort that flies over to the UK every year for Bloodstock Open Air festival, and owns one of those battered fatigue jackets with the band patches all over it. I’m also, of course, a gamer. This pretty much puts me right headbang into Brütal Legend’s target market, so I’ve been all over this game like pig heads at a Mayhem gig since it was originally announced back in 2007.

Designed by former LucasArts wizard, Tim Schafer (Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango), the game is a mashup of brawling, strategy, and Guitar Hero, with visuals designed around classic heavy metal imagery and Frank Frazetta’s iconic fantasy and science fiction artwork, all set to a soundtrack that’s a basically a list of who’s who in mommy and daddy’s worst nightmares. As Nathan Explosion would say, “Brutal.”

The demo’s just dropped onto Xbox LIVE and the PlayStation Network, so I took it for a spin. The game opens up with career roadie and protagonist, Eddie Riggs (voiced by Jack Black), doing his thing for some rubbish band called Kabbage Boy (unsubtly based on similarly rubbish bands like Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park). Stuff goes wrong, and Riggs ends up accidentally awakening Ormagöden, “The Fire Beast, Cremator of the Sky, and Destroyer of the Ancient World”. A sort of walking apocalypse hellbent on the total annihilation of ****ing everything. Anyway, Riggs is yanked off to some sort of parallel dimension where demons have enslaved humanity, and has to save the world. It’s all in a day’s work for a heavy metal roadie, really.

The combat feels like Overlord, but a bit faster. So it’s a whole bunch of chopping stuff up, basic combos, and buckets of totally gratuitous gore. It’s not as elegant as something like Batman: Arkham Asylum, perhaps, but it’s not really trying to be that either. Elegance is for Batman, not beered up headbangers. After dispatching a few cowled skeletons, Riggs learns about Relics – things left lying around in bits and pieces by some progenitor race of Titans. By harnessing the awesome shredding power of his guitar, Clementine, Riggs can summon up these Relics, stick them back together, and put them to hard rocking. This plays out something very much like a mini-Guitar Hero, where you hit notes on cue and riff the Relic right out the ground. The first Relic you’ll find is a hot rod dubbed the Druid Plow, which you put to quick use in mowing down a bunch of bad guys and a gargantuan worm thing. The driving controls are just a bit on the sloppy side, though.

Given the writing credentials and voice talent onboard, the cutscenes and dialogue are superb, and I’m expecting the story to unfold with all the outrageous melodrama and campy machismo of a Manowar album. This game’s release is just two weeks or so out, but if you’re got 1.5 GB of bandwidth to blow, hit up the LIVE Marketplace or PSN to grab the demo in the meantime. Alternately, if you’re rolling around Joburg this weekend, the complete game will be hands-on at the rAge event at the Coca-Cola Dome in Northgate.

Discuss Brutal Legend in the forums