I rarely download demos on XBLA mainly due to there's rarely anything I want to download. The last thing I downloaded was Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts though I did download a XBLA game demos and tried out the demo 360 stage for Sonic Unleashed but I was excited for Brutal Legend. I loved Psychonauts and it appears that this game will do significantly better due to a lot of hype and the source material. People love rock n roll and getting Jack Black on board doesn't hurt either.

After about waiting a half hour or so for the 360 to update then download the demo and pluck its eyebrows, I booted it up. Sadly as with Pyschonauts it takes a good while for the actual game to start up having to listen to story. Now I'm all about good stories in games but I hate when the game stops every five minutes to chatter. On the upside Tim Shaffer is a good storyteller and has a great sense of humor. The game even stops at points to warn you about the swearing and violence and asks if you want it censored or not because if I recall this is Shaffer's first M rated game under the ESRB system (Full Throttle would've gotten an M rating if it had existed at the time).

So Eddie Riggs is the world's greatest roadie who can build awesome sets and fix anything but Eddie's tired of his job nowadays. He works for some wanna be tweener band who pretends to be badass but their songs sound more like teen pop disguised as rock/hip hop. Eddie misses the good old days of rock in roll before MTV. But then a freak accident causes the stage to collapse on him and sends him to a parallel dimension that looks like a rock album cover.

Overal combat is good. It's been a while since I played a good 3D beat em up (the last thing I played was the werehog and that wan't that good). You gain an axe for melee attacks and your guitar blasts baddies away and from this you can get a bunch of killer moves (God of War fans will be right at home with this.). However there was no health meter though this might have just been for the demo. It seemed like I could take as much damage as possible with no consequences but for now I'll assume there will bea health meter in the final version.

Then come some driving sections and I'm not a fan of the driving pyshics. Maybe I've played too much Mario Kart and got used to that set up. It's fine for driving straight but one boss fight has you driving in a circle fighting a giant worm monster. When the thing got stuck I ended up just getting out of the car and wacking it with my axe.

After that the demo ends. Eddie and his lady friend escape but it does show a montage of future levels and the game features something you don't see in a lot of games outside the Wii.....COLOR!!! Yes, while the first level of the game is a gray, brown and red apocolyptic area, the other levels are alive with colors. Actually they remind me somewhat of WoW's levels. Thank you, Tim for not conforming to modern Xbox game design and putting some colors in your game.

Anyway I am interested in getting this as well as several other games but right now I'm broke. I still want to play Scribblenauts and haven't yet.