Jack Black deserves some serious credit. Not only is his turn as Eddie Riggs one of the finest voice acting performances in any game ever (and one of the best of his career full stop), his work in thrusting Tim Schafer’s Brütal Legend into the mainstream consciousness has been truly exemplary. It’s quite clearly a labour of love, and his passion is infectious, but few could have expected him to dress in full Riggs attire and attend the MTV VMA Awards – fake muscle arms and all.

Not only has he done great work in making people aware of a game that always threatened to disappear into niche obscurity, he’s actually given credence to the medium as a whole. If it gets people talking about games with real artistic endeavour over Wii Fit and Brain Training – and it hopefully will – then huge props to Mr Black. The tubby boy done good.

Going back to that phrase, ‘artistic endeavour’, for a second. There’s really no better fit for a game like Brütal Legend. Actually, there is one – Brütal Legend is metal as f***. Rarely has a videogame been injected with so much raw, unadulterated love as this one – it’s a trip into the mind, soul and heart of its illuminatory creator, and all the better for it.

The Brütal Legend in question is that of Eddie Riggs, a disenchanted roadie for a piss-weak rap-metal act, a man who believes in the simpler times of heavy metal, where men were men and all you needed was a cool album cover and a few face-melting solos to get through the day. During a particularly uninspiring gig, Eddie slips into the background to fix something on stage, and accidentally cuts himself, bleeding on his ornate belt buckle in the process.

This summons the metallic god Ormagoden, who proceeds to brutally murder the band and set fire to everything, while Eddie teleports to a place unknown. And when he gets there, any fan of heavy metal is going to be rather excited – this is the living depiction of every classic metal album cover ever drawn. Towers of demonic skulls scrape the scorched skies while barbed hell-creatures prowl the bloodied earth below. And that’s just the first couple of rooms. Before Eddie gets the chance to enjoy or even understand his new surroundings though, he’s set upon by a group of malicious druids.

It’s an introduction to one of Brütal Legend’s multiple styles of gameplay – melee combat. It’s fairly simple, with a button to smack people around with a giant axe, another to play guitar (electricity attack, basically) and a few simple blocks and dodges. Still, cutting down swathes of brilliantly designed enemies is pretty cathartic, if never deep enough to echo the truly great third-person brawlers.

Brütal Legend is no one-trick pony though, so much so it’s actually quite difficult to describe, and almost impossible to pigeonhole. Along with the combat, Brütal Legend encompasses an open-world adventure, vehicular action, and a full-blown RTS. It never settles into a familiar pattern, constantly throwing something new at you at every turn and keeping up its relentless march of blistering heavy metal.

… continued