Archive Update: Twisted Metal

Well this review is long overdue, because I beat this game a few months ago. I'm not a big fan of racing games, but I do love me some car combat. Earlier this generation, I found some satisfaction in Full Auto 2, but I eventually decided to let is go because it just felt too tame. Needless to say that by the time Twisted Metal came out, I was jonesing for some proper car combat. What I got was a bit of a mixed bag.

I should admit that I never took the game online, and this grade is based solely on the single player experience. Each chapter of the game features three cinematics that tell of each main character and their story, and about five levels of actual gameplay each. The cutscenes are very interesting and presented very simply to explain the happenings of the story, but it all kind of feels detached from the gameplay due to the nature of each character. Without going into detail, the background of each character is a murderous past, but none that center around any sort of vehicular combat of any kind. Jumping from a typical slasher type killer to a car combat champion is a big leap; I wish there was more connection with the vehicles in the backstories. It's also a bit absurd the way they present this tournament to be so secretive; with entire cities seeing so much devastation and so many random people killed in the process, you'd think the evidence would be far too abundant to pass off as a conspiracy theory or an urban legend. But this is also very typical Twisted Metal, and you're supposed to suspend as much disbelief for this franchise as you do for classic grindhouse midnight movies. The bottom line is that overall, the story entertains and each cutscene unlocked feels like a reward, even if the story itself will never win any awards.

In game, Twisted Metal can at times be a glorious exercise of carnage and classic videogame arcade archetypes, and other times be frustrating to a fault. The AI is not above cheap shots like stalling your engines the very second you recover from the last enemy stalling your engine, and in the race levels it can be VERY difficult to see where the next checkpoint is without having to follow an AI to it (which kind of makes winning extra hard if you have to be in second just to see where to go at all). The game is at its best in straight up deathmatch modes, and features some creative and challenging modifiers to the formula that will keep players on their toes. Boss battles were an interesting inclusion, but also drew some frustration as they included some things that required alternate control schemes that only appear in these stages of the game. Still, Twisted Metal is designed in a classic vein and is meant to be tackled with trial and error, and retro gamers will appreciate the need to probe and study the bosses several times before a victory can be achieved.

One area I found to be lacking was in the vehicle selection. Only a handful of vehicles are actually in the game, unlockable or otherwise, and each is displayed with a very oversimplified strengths and weaknesses chart that will likely lead most players to sticking with just one or two vehicles for any event. The vehicles that are available are also very plain. Half of the selection felt almost like they'd been ripped out of the FlatOut franchise from last generation. I was also disappointed in the sense that so much emphasis is put to each character and each of them clearly has a default vehicle, but only Sweet Tooth's default seemed to really be personalized for its intended driver. The cars felt very ambiguous, and it made it a bit harder to connect the story to the gameplay when Dollface is driving Sweet Tooth's Ice Cream truck.

But overall, Twisted Metal is a fun game with tons of content. I can't say if online play is really up to par or not since I didn't play it, but even offline there's tons of fun to be had. After some serious thought, I honestly don't think the game is good enough to make the cut for my top 40 when this generation is over, but in the meantime it's a good game to kill some time with. I give it a C.

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“I act like I know shit all the time, but I'm a complete moron. This hasn't solved anything.”

-ZephyrGamgee

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