so anyone play the Brütal Legend demo on xbox live?
(or other platforms)
the humor was good, don’t think the grafics will win any prizes and the gameplay (as far as I could see) consist of hitting stuff with a axe, lightning blasting them with a guitar, and driving over stuff with a Hot-rod.
I like the way they put in the gore/profanty filter even made me play the demo twice to see how cut scenes would change
I have no interest in it, but I’ve heard it’s fun, so I may get the demo and see how it plays.
It better be really good to pull me away from other current games.
You don’t think the graphics will win any prizes? The art appears to be the entire reason for the game. It’s certainly why I’m interested in playing it.
I don’t expect the gameplay to be mindblowing, but it’s a heavy-metal-themed world. That in itself is awesome.
Hopefully this starts a trend of using metal in games. I thought MadWorld on Wii was a great game, but the hip-hip/gangsta rap soundtrack was lame. It was much better when I shut the in-game music off and cranked up Cannibal Corpse, Bolt Thrower, etc. on the stereo.
What I meant was, that the graphic engine looks like it would run an Xbox or a PS2, the artwork in the demo was a bit sparse so I couldn’t comment on that
The demo gave me a good laugh. A world full of temples and mountains made of skulls? So metal, so awesome!
I have faith in Tim Schafer, based on the greatness of his past games, that this one’ll be good. At this point, though, I don’t get quite how the multiplayer part is gonna work.
This video is pretty much the only thing I’ve seen on Brutal Legend, and yet it’s enough to make me want the game. I’m surprised the demo is sparse on artwork; the game looks like it’s nothing but.
It’s got metäl, Tim Schafer and Tenacious D. As far as I’m concerned, it couldn’t fail even if Uwe Boll directed the cutscenes.
Played the demo this weekend and loved it, especially the rip on the nu-metal poser band in the setup scene. Anyone catch the Raz dance the guitarist was doing on the platform above the stage before he fell?
Just the humor would probably be worth playing the game for, but I’m sure Schafer has lots of original gameplay in store. Didn’t get to see too much of the gameplay in the demo, but reviews describing the multi-player stuff sounds intriguing.
They have created beauty by simply rocking.
I saw an ad for this on TV the other night. Really looked like the evil love child of Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft. 
I downloaded the demo last night. It’s pretty nice and imaginative and the scenery is gorgeous, but it’s a button-masher, not really a World of Warcraft-type of game (if that’s what you;re looking for).
I don’t think I’ll be buying it, at least not new.
There is a stereo in the car. It has much much music in it.
Um. K?
If the demo doesn’t make you at least chuckle, you probably won’t like this game.
If you’re the kind of gamer who’s only attracted to constant, pulse-pounding action and perfectly balanced gameplay, you probably won’t like this game.
If you’re someone who can’t understand why everyone thought Psychonauts was great, you probably won’t like this game.
To everyone else: the game is pretty excellent, and the demo doesn’t even show off any of the extended combos, vehicle weapons, upgrade systems, side missions, hidden collectibles, and most of all, the ‘stage battle’ mode, around which the game was originally built. It involves summoning different squads of units (headbangers as the front-line and basic combat unit, razorgirls as an effective ranged damage unit, bassists on amp-choppers who heal your units, and also cannoniers, roadies, and possibly more I haven’t unlocked) and then directing those units to take over ‘fan geysers’ who send energy to your stage with which to summon more units. Meanwhile, you can fly above the battlefield giving orders or soar down to take part in the melee.
It’s an action/strategy hybrid idea that’s been done to some extent in games like Guilty Gear 2, Dynasty Warriors, Demigod… and it measures pretty well to them.
However, as I mentioned - if you’re playing Brutal Legend just for the gameplay, you’re kinda missing the point. The reason to play it is the atmosphere created by the game: the legend of a world steeped in epic-looking designs come to life, fjords made out of amps, healing strings made out of the silk of a chrome spider queen, boulders with aged engine pipes jutting artistically out.
And that’s to say nothing of the pretty amazing talent lending their voices and likenesses to the game: Ozzy Osbourne, Jack Black, Lita Ford, Lemmy Killmeister… I’ve never been a huge fan of metal, but I know these names enough to be pretty impressed by the fact that they’re all a part of this self-aware tribute to the realized world that the music and album covers hinted at back when hard rock was getting its start.
The game does have its flaws, and there’s not a huge variety in the secondary missions that I’ve seen. But there’s still enough stuff to do and currency incentive to do it that I can’t imagine anyone getting bored, even if they were stuck on a mission or didn’t want to advance the story at all.
The final reason the full game deserves a look by everybody with a console is that the dialogue is as hilarious as the art design is clever. Tim Schafer either wrote or helped write Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, and a few others. He has a knack for making games that are definitively better written, from a humor standpoint, than pretty much anything else on the market that qualifies as a game.
And while it’s true that it’s hard to imagine blowing $60 on a game for its humor value (which can mostly be absorbed in one playthrough), I’d like to put forth a grim scenario: Brutal Legend–much like Psychonauts–fails to sell enough to help EA break even on the investment (after spending some order of magnitude more in marketing than Psychonauts had as well as an undisclosed settlement to the nice two-timers at Activision who dropped the game from its publishing but didn’t reeeaaally drop the game, don’t you know), and is generally a flop despite critical acclaim. This sends one very clear message to the games industry: no matter how you market it, no matter who you hire to act in it, no matter how much love and art is put into a game in today’s market…
Originality doesn’t sell.
If it doesn’t have killstreaks and FPS stylings and maybe online co-op, the game is not worth making. EA is taking a pretty huge risk by putting so much of their money this holiday behind a game in a relatively untested genre, with a brilliant writer/director who hasn’t had a hit since the 90s, in a market that seems to reward only the same exact thing every year. Last year’s flop was Mirror’s Edge; this year hasn’t seen them earn nearly as much as the usual amount from the staples like Madden, which are usually used to float the more unique games. The chips are already down for Brutal Legend.
A few months will tell whether the bet was sound and uniqueness has a place on game store shelves, or whether the average young twitch-gamer can only be count upon to shell out for the Halos, Calls of Duty, Grand Thefts Auto, and their various clones.
What? You can get the stereo as an upgrade, and it’s got a couple dozen songs in it and you can drive around like a freaking madman ramming stuff and blowing stuff up and listening to metal.
It’s a good thing.
Rented it. Made it as far as the first Drowning Doom battle before giving up.
I don’t think it’s a case of not enough material as not enough GOOD material. I actually like that melees are fairly simple hack 'n blast affairs, and that there aren’t a bazillion powerups to choose from. It’s pretty simple to earn Fire Tributes (what you buy powerups with); I never had to repeat any side mission more than once. And the lack of life bars, which I was skeptical of at first, actually make life and death a lot more visceral and give a greater sense of urgency to fighting.
That’s the good stuff. What I didn’t like was the complete structurelessness of the world. News flash: Untamed land and lack of marking make it really, really easy to get lost. Made worse by the fact that you have to drive just about everywhere. First you need to play a riff to call up your vehicle, and given how often you have to do this, it gets tedious quickly. And JUST ONCE, realism be damned, I’d like to see a vehicle that simply turns aside when running into an obstacle or obstruction instead of getting freaking hung up for fifteen seconds. No, no fun at all. But the worst part is the Warcraft-style stage battles…y’know, manage 20 things at once, have to rush hither and yon to secure resources, enemies bursting out of the woodwork anywhere and everywhere, structures getting smashed, troops getting decimated, constantly running and hacking and organizaing and deploying and regrouping and this and that and him and ham, and as often as not I still find myself on the razor’s edge of total disaster all the freaking time.
A shame, since the story is actually pretty good and there’s some awesome music here. (Aside: Does anyone else think it’s weird to use Through The Fire And Flames for a 1-minute driving stage?)
5/10. If you’re into multiplayer, maybe 7.
What critical acclaim is that? I’ve read a few reviews, most of which indicated that the game had an interesting concept but that gameplay was a bit of a mess. The title has an 82% on GameRankings (83 on Metacritic), which, while no “Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust” (16%) is nothing to write home about, and certainly doesn’t reek of “acclaim” (“Greatly praised or lauded, revered, highly respected”).
I know that “metareview” sites have a certain stigma, but it’s usually easy to pick out a title that everyone liked. Clearly, Brutal Legend didn’t quite make that cut.
Well, I know Painkiller had a very heavy metal soundtrack, and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within was a bit metal as well.
I would agree. It’s like I like the game more in theory than actually like it.