Brutal Legend has been a long time coming. I’ve spent quite a bit of my life playing games that were created by Tim Schafer and I can still give you step-by-step instructions on how to complete Monkey Island 2, even after sinking a few beers. I'd then drunkenly explain why Psychonauts is still worth shelling out for on Xbox Live and why I love you.

So true to form, I’m reviewing this demo at least 10 days after the game is on general release, and if I weren’t presently so embarrassingly destitute I would have no doubt bought it already. Unfortunately for me, times are tough, the recession marches on, and I have to make-do with whatever Tim Schafer Esq cleared for ‘promotional purposes only’ on Xbox Live.

The Double Fine splash screen has the ever-endearing conjoined twins Axl’d up with bandanas and leather trousers. A suitably glam voice screams “Dooouble Fiiiii-aaaayn!” after a little guitar crunch. This cuts to a wooden tabletop where some real-life hands (Jack Black’s one would believe) place a Brutal Legend LP front and centre. Some diegetic Judas Priest/Iron Maiden-esque metal is played low in the background, like a turntable in another room. I recognised Sabbath’s Symptom of the Universe. The LP looks to be well loved, with nice worn edges. The grimy price sticker in the top right reads “6.66” and the Brutal Legend motif is reminiscent of any number of METAL! insignias. A big red sticker glows “Press Start.”

This is no splash screen: the LP is the menu. This is a Nice Touch. The music gets a little bit louder. Flipping the left stick right cycles through the menu, and Jack Black’s hands explore the whole LP. Back cover, pulling out the sleeve, then the disc, and then the reverse of the disc. It is neither premature, nor needless hyperbole, to hail this menu as the “Best Menu Ever” – a work of staggering genius. I recognise Metallica’s Diamondhead's “Am I Evil?”

Okay, enough of this, let’s hit New Game before I tear up in wanton nostalgia. The difficulty levels come up. I’m a little disappointed that they’re not worked into the LP menu, but they come in three flavours: Gentle, Normal and Brutal. I’ll just go with Normal in this instance.

It zooms into the mountain on the LP, all the way, and it becomes a stage and backstage, we see Eddie Riggs hunched over a guitar smoking a cigarette. The pop culture references are spread thick, like peanut butter on a bagel, and this is undoubtedly a Good Thing. Not just because it’s a witty sideswipe at the rap-metal-electro-emopop-teenybashers, but because it illustrate perfectly just how medieval leather-strapped, oversized-beltbuckled, black-number-one’d Heavy Metal is in comparison. I’m gonna guess that most people’s exposure to Ozzy is through MTV’s The Osbornes.

The cutscene continues and one of the bandmembers bounds up the giant stage monument and out on one the protruding beams. Eddie Riggs doesn’t like this, so clenching his fist he cries out to the hapless popstar, “Get down from there you stupid motherfu…” and a neat little menu comes out of his mouth. It gives you two options regarding swearwords: “I want to hear every nasty syllable” or “It’s funnier if you bleep it out.” I’m gonna be honest with you here: having just referenced The Osbornes, I think it probably IS funnier to bleep it out. Even so, this is a very novel and unpatronising approach to game censorship.

In saving the teenybopper, our hero manages to unleash a giant metal helldog when he bleeds onto his beltbuckle. Another choice pops up, this one regarding gore: “Okay, but only when it really would look very awesome” or “No gore, please!” I’m not prudish about the old ultraviolence, so I hit the claret option. The crowd go wild for this shiny chrome helldog and it all fades to black, spare his burning eyes. Another nice touch, the “loading” font in the bottom right is reminiscent of Black Sabbath’s logo.

Eddie wakes up in another realm, there are some badguys, they go right for him, and in a perfect Benny Hill moment, they come up one flight of stairs while you peg it down the other and grab a giant axe, Sword in the Stone style, out of a burning crack in the room’s floor. He holds it aloft, and the screen overlays a comicbook style introducing this weapon as “The Separator”. I could cry. I'm definitely welling up.

Having hacked and slashed the metal-wraiths into red mist, you get hold of Eddie’s Flying V guitar, “Clementine” – the range attack element. Hitting X wails out some truly face-melting solos, and the wraiths promptly vaporise. Those strings get pretty hot though, and Eddie blows on them to try and cool them down. A giant range attack literally brings the house down.

And that is really all I need from this demo. If it ended here, I would be completely fine with that (it doesn’t, there’s a demon bossfight you may remember from the trailer). This is certainly the first demo I’ve played on Xbox Live where I knew I wanted to buy the game anyway, but this has done nothing to dissuade me. Now if only I could scrape together the cash to do so.

Update: I played through the rest of the demo, and it has all the elements of a Tim Schafer game including a nice little nod to Grim Fandango. The combat gameplay is no more involved than Psychonauts, but to call it simple or repetitive would be to miss the point. I'm gonna guess that like Psychonauts, this game is going to be about exploring another world, and from what I've seen of it thus far, I'm in.