Tiamatini

This has been pushed really hard of late on tv over here, so I thought I’d download the demo of Brutal Legend and give it a go, see if it was worth all the hype.  I have to admit, I was quite looking forward to it.  I do like a lot of Jack Black’s stuff, and thought this looked quite funny and entertaining from the adverts, so I had pretty high hopes.  I now feel a bit like I do when I come out of an overhyped film – it just didn’t live up to its promise.  Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t all that.

Read on to find out why, this time around, Mr Black just didn’t scratch the itch…

The demo opens with a very very long cut scene.  I’m sure this is fine if you’re going on to play a game that’s potentially several hours long, but when you’ve only got maybe half an hour to sample a game, you don’t want the first 10 minutes taken up with you doing nothing.  Well, not quite nothing, you get to choose whether you’re going to hear the swearwords or whether they’ll be bleeped, then you can choose whether to see the full-on gore-fest or the dumbed down version.  I have to admit I thought that was quite a nice touch, it did make me smile, and at least I was getting to hit some buttons, but that’s about the sum total of your interaction for the first several minutes.

Once you get through the cut scene you find yourself waking up in an ancient crumbling down temple, facing some demon warrior types in long cloaks, you have to run around to avoid them for a bit til you grab the conveniently placed axe and guitar which are your weapons.  Again, the guitar’s a nice touch, but the response time seemed quite slow – you’d hit the buttons and it’d take the game a wee bit of time to catch up, which is problematic when you’re battling more than one demon warrior at a time.  There is a move to push them all back at once, but that only works for so long, at some point you have to actually kill them…  Anyway, you kill off the various respawning demons, and then you face your first “boss battle” such as it is.  I seem dismissive of it because at the bottom of the hill you’re going to face several of the she-demons along with the original foes and they’re not really that much of a big deal…  You’ll also meet your sidekick, a rock chick who was hoping to beat you to the axe.

Down the hill you make a car out of random bits and pieces lying around, and then you’re ready to go!  On to the most annoying battle I’ve ever fought.  You face a giant worm demon popping up through a hole in the ground, and you have to distract it while your sidekick plays with the gate.  The only way to do this is to drive round and round in circles, driving over each of the 3 forks of its toungue as they get stuck to the ground.  Theoretically, this should be really easy, the problem is you have no control over the camera, so at various points your car disappears behind the wall and you have absolutely no idea where it’s gone and why it’s not emerging out the other side.  (For reference it’s usually because it’s run up against a random pile of rocks or a bit of the wall that jutts out, but you don’t know that because you can’t freakin’ see!)  Eventually I cut off the toungues, collapsed the gate on its head and realised that it still wasn’t dead, and just as I was about to drive away into what looked like the really good bit of the game on the ads, yup, that’s right, the demo ended.

I was telling a friend about it, and he summed it up nicely with “sounds a bit hit and miss”, and it really is.  I reckon it probably gets better as it goes on, but to be honest, I’m just not willing to pay nearly $60 to find out…