Check it out… there’s a Brutal Legend gameplay demo at Gamepro. This is the first time that I’ve really seen the game in action. Cutscenes and trailers don’t give you a handle on how a game will actually play. This however, confirms that the game will be as awesome as it looked before.
I don’t think I’m going to give away anything particularly spoiler-ish, but just in case, the rest of this post continues after the jump.
This game looks like somebody spent a lot of hours playing Ocarina of Time while listening to heavy metal.
Do I object to this concept? No way. Ocarina of Time is quite possibly my favorite video game ever–even more than Rock Band. This takes an old favorite and adds another favorite–heavy metal–to it. It’s like mixing chocolate and peanut butter–what you get at the end is even more awesome than the parts you put in. Or at least I hope it will be.
The one thing that worries me about the screen as displayed is that you don’t have any kind of health or magic meters, which can be a bit difficult, at least at the start. Being able to see exactly how much damage a hit does allows me to determine just how close I want to get to an enemy at any given time. The lower the bar is, the faster I get moving and the further away I stay. Not having that information is going to cause strategic problems, at least for me.
Magic (in this case, harnessed through the guitar) is equally problematic. You get some visual feedback when the guitar glows, but the player has no way to know how close they are to running out of juice until they do it. Once again, something that could get you into a crunch pretty quick. (Although, I will confess that I have occasionally gotten myself into a empty-magic-meter crunch in Oblivion, where the meter is perfectly visible.)
I’m reserving judgment on the health and magic system until I can at least get my hands on the game. There may be other cues built into the game that I haven’t picked up on from watching the video that may become more evident once the game is in play. Worst case, the game frustrates me and gets traded back to Gamestop for something else.
All told though, still completely stoked for this game. The visuals are stunning. Schafer talked a lot about the amount of inspiration that they pulled from heavy metal album cover art, but talk is one thing, and so are trailers–like I said. This demo showed that the trailers are completely accurate to the look and feel of the game.
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Tags: Brutal Legend