Brutal Legend Preview

BY Abbas Jaffar Ali | POSTED: 29 April 2009

Coming this holiday season to the PS3 and Xbox 360.



Brutal Legend was the game that got me most excited at the show. Headed by Tim Schafer who has previously worked on classics like the Monkey Island, Full throttle and Grim Fandango, Brutal Legend tells the story of a Roadie named Eddie Riggs (voiced over by none other than Jack Black) who has been transported into a Metal Age.

Face Off

Eddie is one of the best roadies and is the go to guy for getting almost anything done- from tuning guitars to setting up stages. The game starts with Eddie getting knocked out one night by a stage accident and some of his blood lands on his belt buckle- a gift from his father.  This sucks him in a world that's based on the metal age where heavy metal album covers and lyrics come to life. A world where the evil emperor Doviculus and his demon army have enslaved the last remaining humans. Joining Lars, his sister Lila and the mysterious Ophelia, its Eddie's job to save the human race.

I got to see the intro that serves as a tutorial for this 3rd person game and a bit further into the game. You start out with an axe and your guitar- the axe works like your typical hack’n’slash weapon while the guitar causes ranged damage. You’ll learn new strums along the way increasing the magical abilities of your guitar. By the end of the intro, you've met Ophilia and created a car using clues left behind by the ancients that you drive around or over foes and get to different parts of the world.

Headbangers

Once the intro ends, your first mission is to gather an army of headbangers that you will use for larger scale attacks. With these armies, you can issue basic commands such as charging or defending or even forming an extremely funny huddle around you- they do all this head-banging. Later on in the game, you’ll get a tour bus to transport your armies while your car also gets upgraded with guns etc.

Sticking to his style, Tim Schafer makes the game hilarious. Add to that Jack Black’s voice acting and you have an extremely entertaining game that will have you in splits. Although we weren’t allowed to play the game, it seemed pretty easy to control from the looks of the person demonstrating it. The graphics look slick and are inspired from Heavy Metal album covers. Don’t be surprised to see towers made of skulls, S&M styled characters and black panthers with lasers beams in their eyes (as per Tim’s statement.) The game was running pretty smoothly even at an early stage.

The Wheels

The music fits the game perfectly and although Tim Schafer did not disclose the final list of songs and artists, he did say that he started out with a list of his favorite songs and hopes to get as many of them as he can. Somewhat like GTA, you’ll probably have random songs playing when Eddie is driving his car with the score changing at boss battles or intense scenes.

Coming this holiday season to the PS3 and Xbox 360, I can easily see Brutal Legend as being one of the best sellers for the holiday season.