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].

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