Brütal Legend Preview

“I don’t know why this game doesn’t exist already,” said Tim Schafer, Brütal Legend’s creator. After sitting down for an hour-long look at the game, I’m forced to agree.

It’s a simple idea. Eddie Riggs, the greatest living roadie, is working for the worst band of all time. He’s injured in an accident on stage, which causes blood to drip into his belt buckle, which, as you’d expect, turns out to be a rather ancient artefact. A demon is summoned, but the audience, cheering, think it’s all part of the show. The demon decapitates the band, and the crowd cheer louder. The demon screams, and Eddie is pulled back in time to the age of metal, and wakes up in a strange temple.

The age of metal is exactly what it sounds like. No, not some some of industrial or steampunk world literally made of metal; it’s a world based around heavy metal, once inhabited by noble giants who invented everything cool. Eventually, they became so cool that they ascended and became rock gods, and everything left behind is of their design. Trees shed tyres, spiders spin bass strings, and hieroglyphics point out how all of this can be used. As things begin in the temple, however, Eddie’s distracted by some druids with sharp implements looking rather pissed-off…

Fortunately, there’s an axe nearby – the Separator – and it transpires that Eddie’s a bit of a dab hand with it, which Schafer hints is a little odd for a roadie. While eviscerating monks, he also comes across one of the guitars he’d tuned for the show, and just as another pair of monks try to sneak up on him, he plays a little riff. Unfortunately for the monks, the guitar has been amplified by the power of the heavy metal world, and Eddie’s riff calls down lightning, frying them.

So, Eddie has two tools for close-range combat. He’s got the axe – capable of cleaving opponents in two – and the guitar, Clementine, which summons special effects like those used in stage shows. Depending on how Eddie plays it, it can call down lightning, or call up pyrotechnics from the ground, or perform an Earthshaker, which, in Schafer’s own words, is a “power chord so strong it shakes the world.”

The game is very, very heavily based on the mythology of heavy metal. “We’re trying to make every piece of concept art and screenshot look like it could be off the cover of a heavy metal album,” said Schafer, and this definitely shows; the temple in which Eddie awakens is situated on top of a hill of bones for goodness’ sake, and one early cutscene ripped directly from the cover of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell (which isn’t exactly metal, but still).

There looks to be plenty of enemies too. Other than the monks and demons, one of the early tutorial encounters to teach the importance of locking into enemies features a giant demonic nun (“Just like in real life, it’s always best to sneak up on a nun from behind,” quipped Schafer.)

Eddie gets down the hill, complete with skulls rolling and bouncing down it, by hitching a ride on the “evil walking altar of evil” that the nun turned up on. Down at the bottom he meets another monk, who – surprise, surprise! – turns out to be a hot rocker chick. The black-haired beauty, Ophelia, is the first companion character Eddie gets, and this gives him the ability to perform team attacks.

The team element is something that hasn’t been elaborated on much before now, but it’s an integral part of the game. As the game goes on, Eddie recruits more and more followers to the resistance. It transpires the world is ruled by demons, and while there are plenty of charismatic leaders around, no-one actually has a clue as to how to get things done, not even noticing the car parts or the hieroglyphics pointing out how to create cool items and vehicles. Naturally, as a roadie, Eddie is the perfect fit to get the resistance going proper. Before long, he’s built a tour bus, and recruited a load of different troop types to fight back against the demons.{PAGE TITLE=Brütal Legend Continued}The first freed are headbangers – taken to an extreme. These kids headbang so much that their necks are grotesquely over-muscled, and they’ve been put to work in the mines, banging away at the walls. Using the power of ROCK, Eddie brings them over to the human resistance, where they can smash their heads into enemies. Their team attack has them act like a human shield, surrounding Eddie in a mosh pit. Anynto is {mashed tmtn ihiela,0eurro pieces. These, and the rest of the troops, are controlled via simple input commands on the D-Pad, telling them to stay and guard an area, or move somewhere, or attack something, and so on. How difficult these controls are to handle, I suspect, is something that’s going to determine how this game is received, particularly with hints that a large emphasis later on will be on huge group battles on the world map.

And that, in fact, is another facet of this game that hasn’t been explored too well – no pun intended. The game is open world. After Eddie builds a hot rod (the Deuce, or “Druid Plow”) to facilitate his and Ophelia’s escape from the bone mountain, you can drive around and explore as much as you’d like rather than getting on with the main missions. We’re promised plenty of easter eggs and side missions from the variety of characters wandering around, and Schafer reckons that about 50% of the game is open at the beginning, with your world map starting blacked out but filling in as you explore. While the early trailers focused on battles against demons in brown regions, it’s worth mentioning that the parts of the game we saw were actually fairly lush and green. Expect a great deal of different terrain types.

You’ve pretty much always got your car at hand, it seems, thanks to the power of guitar solos. These are riffs powerful enough to change the world – one, for instance, summons the Deuce no matter where you are. A second, Battle Cry, inspires nearby troops, and appears to be your primary method of recruitment. We’re told that these will be a “skill-based interactive thing” – early reports indicated that support for the Guitar Hero controllers was planned, and I’d wager they were intended for use in solos. Although those plans have now been scrapped due to the annoyance of changing controllers back and forth, that might give an idea as to what we can expect.

The other thing that I haven’t mentioned yet is the style. This game is bloody gorgeous. Features are exaggerated and cartoony, as with Psychonauts, but the character design is far less “weird,” so don’t expect blue kids with misshapen heads and Nik-Naks for hair. The human characters look human, and the animation, even in this build, is top-notch, with subtle movements enhancing the characters. When Eddie looks away very slightly during a conversation, you notice, and he looks away because it enhances the comedy of the moment.

The voice acting and dialogue are exactly what you’d expect from a Schafer game, too. Jack Black genuinely adds to the proceedings, and it doesn’t feel like he’s a star that’s been put in the game solely for the sake of advertising. We’re told that a lot of the voice acting has been done by music legends, with Lemmy Kilmister as the Kill Master, and appearances by Rob Halford of Judas Priest, and Ronnie James Dio, amongst others. In terms of humour, and animation, and character, there is one thing I can say that will hopefully sum it up: It looks to rival Psychonauts, and that’s possibly the biggest compliment I can give a game when it comes to those criteria.

All this and we’ve not even discussed some of the more bonkers aspects of the plot we heard, or the upgrade system, or the different types of missions, or the environments, or the ways in which the feel of the world is conveyed, or the other troop types, or the vehicle combat, or the car’s radio, or the place names, or particular lines of dialogue, or the little ways the game nudges the player in the right direction, or speculating on the multiplayer, or the critters, or any of the other hundreds of things I’d love to spend my wordcount on. So, instead, I’m just going to say one thing.

I’m really excited about this one [Ed: Really, Tim?  I couldn't have guessed].