Brutal Legend review

By BatRastered — September 25, 2009
Tags: Brutal-Legend Double-Fine PS3 review Tim-Schafer xbox-360

After some hands-on with Brutal Legend, what's the verdict?

Brutal Legend is a good looking game with some serious production values. It's basically a hack-and-slash 3-d platformer mashup. The animation is great and the dialogue and voice acting (featuring Jack Black) are top-notch. You can certainly expect some laughs while playing through this game. It feels like you're controlling a Jack Black animated feature.

You have two basic weapons, your axe and your guitar. Your axe functions much like you'd expect it to, with decapitated and bisected enemies strewn about in its wake. Your guitar allows you to shoot either some sort of lightning, or pyro effects. The pyro allows you to knock enemies up in the air, where you can knock them out baseball style with your axe.

The controls are tight while on foot, but tend to get a little loose when you're in your vehicle. Like most third person 3-d games, this one too suffers from some camera issues. There are options to set the camera speed, and those help, but a re-center type button would've been nice. One of the boss battles has you driving your car, but the camera is panned out and not behind you which creates a bit of steering trouble (for me anyway).

The finished game also includes a muliplayer mode, which should add some replayability to this title.

If you like the hack-and-slash or 3-d platformer genre, I'm sure you won't be dissapointed with this game. Me, I love everthing about this game, except playing it. It's really not my style, game-play wise. I'd love to watch someone else play through it. I would definitely try before you buy, especially if you have an XBox live gold account, as you can download the demo right now, for free. If you're one of those people who loved Psychonauts so much that you still talk about, well, WTF are you doing reading this, don't you have a pre-order to pick up?

Brutal Legend

Brutal Legend review

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