Brütal Legend Preview

30 Apr 2009 at 10:39:34 by Tim McDonald

“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.

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