Opinionation: Brutal Legend Demo

After months of waiting, incredible legal bouts between publishing giants, and 1614 MB of downloading, PS3 and 360 owners got their first taste of the Jack Black / Tim Schafer team up Brutal Legend last week. So were all the production battles and waiting worth it? If this demo is anything to go by, my answer has to be a double horn throwing "hell-yeah!" It shouldn't come as much of a surprise since I was a big fan of Double Fine's first title Psychonauts, have a love of metal, and rather enjoy action-adventure titles in its vein. But let's take a quick look the demo and figure out just exactly how much it rocks on a scale of one to eleven.

After playing this demo one cannot be blamed for thinking that Brutal Legend could be summarized as an "Adventure"-accented brawler that takes the majority of its cues from God of War. But that would overlook the subtle and not so subtle things that separate this title from the rest of the pack. With few minor exceptions (which I'll note later), everything about this demo oozed with quality. The record driven main menu, beautiful character design, stunning environments, and, of course, Schaffer's signature writing all come together for one of the most entertaining demos that I've played in a long, long time. The hefty demo gives you basic combat, two vehicle sections, a fun boss fight, a hilarious Zelda reference, and plenty of laughs. The demo is strictly linear and doesn't show off any of the open world material, but there's a good amount of the game presented and everyone with the ability to try this demo out should do so immediately.

That said I did encounter two minor issues that took me out of the experience. The first only applies to PS3 players by the sound of it and that is the audio. The version of the demo that I played suffered from some super compressed sound effects and odd music volume issues. I really hope that this issue gets ironed out by release as I could see it driving people away from the title, but I have to say that the experience has encouraged me to pick up the 360 version. The second issue I had with the demo was what I call "L3 sin." Industry professionals and budding designers please take note, I hate using the analogue stick clicking for anything. The demo only uses this for a vehicle's "turbo" button, but it's something that would be better placed on a real button and not a pretend one. It's a minor annoyance, but not a deal breaker.

For months leading up to the demo, I've been trying to avoid spoilerific information about the title which caused the title to slide off my radar a little, but this demo brought it back the to forefront of my mind and I'm counting down the days between now and the full game's release on Rocktober 13th. How many of you dear readers got chance to check out the demo? What did you think of it? Did it leave you shouting for an encore or a sound check? Share you thoughts in the comments.