Superbuu3's Review: Twisted Metal PS3

Sony’s oldest exclusive franchise is back, with a reboot, but how does a game based around vehicle combat, an almost non-existent genre today, hold up? Well the good news is Twisted Metal has made a triumphant return and certainly does deliver the fast, frantic mayhem fans would expect.

Twisted Metal is a car combat game with destructible environments, a large variety of weapons and vehicles with special weapons. The game covers these areas well and essentially if that description has piqued your interest you will most likely enjoy the game.

At first glance Twisted Metal appear to be a game of simply driving around and shooting everything, but once you have a controller in your hand, it dawns upon you that this game is difficult and will certainly take a long time to master. Veterans of the series will most likely slip straight into the action without a second thought. Newcomers will want to take an immediate detour to the live action tutorial to learn the controls. Even the tutorial may seem somewhat frustrating until you change the controls to the racer layout, which is more reminiscent of current gen games. The use of the one six axis motion in the control scheme, and multiple button presses required for certain actions make controls cumbersome at times. There is an in game hints and tips section that tries to advise you on how to utilise vehicles to their maximum potential, which is a very helpful addition and can help ease you into the game.

The original twisted metal came out in 1995 and we haven’t seen a release on home consoles since 2005. So many people may have forgotten about Sweet Tooth and his fellow twisted metal competitors, but most characters have been dropped from the series,; fortunately they left the keys to their cars and any character can drive any car now. This reboot tries to develop the characters further using a mix of live action movies and narration during the games story mode. The premise of the game is contestants are granted a wish for winning a competition; the character stories are macabre and reminiscent of old horror movies. In the EU version of the game one of the scenes has been cut short by a few seconds, removing the blood spray from a character being stabbed in the eye. These scenes are long and thankfully can be skipped to get you back into the action as soon as possible, but a lot of effort has gone into them and the story so are worth watching at least once.

Story mode has a steep difficulty curve even on the lowest difficulty setting, which some will find frustrating. It can be made easier by teaming up with a friend for split-screen co-op, which works well and is a great addition. The game features unlockables that can be used in story mode as you progress. In story-mode, there is a variety of deathmatches, races, and end-of-level bosses, but the main focus of the game is the multi-player mode.

Multiplayer supports multiple players going online in split-screen, and as you can sign into your own PSN account, you can record your own stat progression. Playing against competitors online makes the game even more challenging and entertaining. There are a host of free for all and team modes, ranging from simple deathmatches, to more objective based gameplay involving protecting and attacking targets. A few criticisms for the online mode are that you need to unlock vehicles and weapons separately. This means that when playing online you will have a huge offset where experienced players will not only be better at the game then you, but will also have better weapons and vehicles. This can be fairly daunting, but fortunately it is possible to level up playing the team modes so there is at least a solution to this problem. The second problem I noticed was that trying to join an in-progress game online normally leads to a message about a connection error, so it is normally best to find a room where the game hasn’t yet started. There are also options to play this game via LAN or up to 4 players split-screen, which are increasingly rare features now, but are certainly great additions to a game of this type and means that even without online you can still have a decent amount of multiplayer fun.

Overall, any long term fans of the series will enjoy this game and can even purchase special editions of the game that includes an exclusive port of the PS2 classic Twisted Metal: Black. For everyone else if you have been looking for a car combat game, this is the only noteworthy game in the genre.

8/10 A must buy for fans of the series and good enough for anyone else to give it a try.