Brutal Legend places you in the leather-clad bulky get-up of Eddie Riggs, reputedly the world's greatest roadie, who is careless enough to bleed on his cursed belt buckle, the Ormagöden. This act transports him to another world, which looks like a cross between every heavy metal album cover ever made and an ancient Nordic fantasy realm ruled by demons. It is here that the game takes place, with Eddie taking his vast experience in all things metal and putting them to good use in becoming the saviour that this land needs. So far, trailers and snippets from the game have shown Eddie to take after his voice talent, Jack Black, which means plenty of wise cracking. Hopefully this also indicates that the game itself will have yet another enjoyably witty and hilarious script from Schafer.
When I'm on the road, I'm indestructible. No one can stop me... but they try.
Since the world of Brutal Legend is largely centered around the glory of rock, many of the gameplay's concepts have also taken inspiration from the genre. For instance, Eddie's two main weapons are both axes. That is to say, one is an actual axe called 'The Seperator', while the other is his guitar, nicknamed 'Clementine', which is used to cast magic. In addition, the races which inhabit this alternate reality have links to metal as well, for instance there are creatures resembling headbangers at rock concerts, sentenced to endlessly mine by slamming their heads against solid rock. It's up to you to put their heads to a better use.
In addition to simply being an action game, Brutal Legend allows you to command squads of soldiers as you build an army to free the land. For instance, you can command a group of headbangers with the d-pad, but you can also unleash a co-op attack, which in the case of the headbangers involves a mosh pit. While the combat promises to deliver all the blood and violence you'd expect from a game based on metal, these added layers of strategy will hopefully provide some meat to the confrontations you have with all of the game's assorted baddies.
When you're not battling hideous demons, you'll be exploring. The other major component of the game that we haven't mentioned yet is that it is being created as an open-world sandbox game with 64 square kilometers of metal-inspired fantasy land. To traverse this landscape, Eddie's got access to 'The Deuce', a motorcycle of a sort, that can be summoned at almost any time. There's also a multiplayer mode that's heavily based on real-time-strategy, in which eight players can participate in two teams. There are three factions to choose from, the Ironheade, The Drowning Doom and The Tainted Coil. Each player controls a main unit with similar abilities melee and magic abilities to the single player game, as well as controlling all of the units they summon from their team's shared resources.
Punk rock tried to kill the metal. But it failed!
We lied, there's one more major component of the game we haven't brought up yet, but you kind of already know what it is - the soundtrack. Starting with the voice acting, Hollywood funnyman and half-of-Tenacious D Jack Black voices Eddie Riggs, but there's a host of metal celebrities backing him up. Motorhead's Lemmie Kilmister, Judas Priest's Rob Halford, Lita Ford and Ozzy Osbourne are all present and accounted for, as well as other well-known actors like Tim Curry, who plays the evil Lord Doviculus. Recently, the game's hefty metal soundtrack was announced with a cacophony of well-known metal tunes to thrash to, including tracks from Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Rob Zombie, Megadeth, and of course, Tenacious D.
Brutal Legend certainly seems to have gone to enough effort to please the heavy metal crowd, but it also seems to be trying to do something unique with its gameplay as well. Not just an action game, not just a sandbox world, and not just a squad-command outing, it's certainly balancing several interesting aspects. While Tim Schafer has an impeccable pedigree, it remains to be seen how well these elements will be combined, but if his track record is anything to go by, we may be in for an entertaining, witty and original ride into an alternate world of awesome.
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