Playstation 1 classic Twisted Metal makes its eagerly anticipated return this weekend, yet will gamers be eager to follow the exploits of Sweet Tooth this time around?
By Leo Stiles
Every so often, a game comes along that seems so dated that you feel as if it has been developed in cave that has been cut off from the world for a decade or more. So when the latest Playstation exclusive arrived and was found bathed in metal music, grungy visuals and happens to be a car combat title, you have to double check your clock to check that the last few years haven’t been just a strange dream you had.
Twisted Metal is perhaps one of the greatest throwbacks you will ever see in your life and is so singlemindedly pure of what it has set out to achieve that it almost allows you to look past its obvious shortcomings and give in to its not inconsiderable pleasures. The trouble with this is there is an awful lot to overlook.
Where to start? Well, let’s just take the controls for starters, as they make no concessions to newcomers to the series, or the current obsession of the industry, the casual gaming crowd. Every button on the PS3 controller is used and in multiple combinations, with the added complication of different control schemes for the various vehicles.
There are four different buttons just to fire weapons and while boost is a click and hold of the left stick, the super boost drags Sixaxis controls out of their grave and asks you to lunge towards the screen to execute it. Simply put, the controls are about as easy to get to grips with as quantum physics and take far to long too become familiar.
Unforgivable was my first thought but a good few of hours and one or two bouts of extended profanity later, I was throwing my cars around the arenas like an old pro. It does take work – an alien concept in today’s handholding times – but trust me; the moment when you can execute a 180 degree break turn, then boot backwards while bulls-eying your opponent is guaranteed to send a riot of endorphins to the gaming side of your brain.
Twisted Metal’s environments are huge, ugly affairs that are impressive in scale. With the current obsession with tight compact kill boxes in first person shooters, the amount of acreage to boot around in did give me a bit of a jolt and again it takes time to get to grips with the intricacies of the map design.
Unfortunately, they are not attractive and for a game which is undeniably as bonkers and Twisted Metal is, it was a disappointment that the palette of the game was so drab and uninspired. It’s car combat for God’s sake – the crazier the better, right?
This drabness extends to the fiction that ties the game together. Twisted Metal games of old have always had plenty of personality in that boneheaded WWE kind of way. This latest version jettisons all the different characters and unique vehicles for a focus on three: Sweet Tooth, Doll Face and Mr. Grimm.
Each character has a ‘grindhouse’-inspired live action story that is interspersed throughout the game and looks like it was made by a company that was outsourced by Sony to come up with the connective tissue based on a single character sketch.
This scaling back of the characters has more egregious effects on the gameplay as all vehicles are now available to all characters, once unlocked. Whereas each vehicle in past Twisted Metal games was uniquely tied to a character, the vehicles in this latest versions are just recognizable cars and trucks with armor plating and chainguns strapped to the side.
Surprising depth
It’s not all bad. It’s just that it takes a while to uncover the games true charms, which paradoxically turns out to be a surprising amount of gameplay depth.
This hinges on the fact that you now have a three-vehicle team to use instead of a single car. Each vehicle has a different rating on armor, maneuverability and weapons and allows you to build a team to suit the match type. In play, you can swap your vehicle using the garages located on the maps and this allows a fair degree of strategic play as the longer you leave a damaged vehicle in your garage, the more health it regenerates. Similarly, you can hold off on your big guns until the pack has been weakened and them go in rocket launchers blazing for the win.
Health pickups are also managed smartly and as well as sparse heath pick-ups, mobile ramps circle the map that replenish all you life but are then knocked out of play for a cool down period once used. This can often lead to a frantic chase for the last ramp and can leave you as a sitting duck for the rest of the pack.
The single player mode is bare bones, as is a bot-based version of the multiplayer mode for the most part, with the exception of the epic scaled boss fights at the end of each of the three chapters. The campaign has little to recommend it apart from the chance to hone your skills before the inevitability of online competition.
This is where the game finally comes alive and shows its true worth. Shorn of all the silly grindhouse aesthetic, Twisted Metal becomes a ferocious competitive experience across a diverse variety of match types. In this purified mode, the game becomes as addictive as any online shooter with the explosive death matches being the initial draw.
But as you dig in to the options, chances are you will be drawn into the more complex and rewarding team based modes and the unpredictable cage matches which sees a safe zone randomly appear on the map in timed intervals with time outside it damaging your health.
Online is not without its own problems, with time spent in lobbies waiting exceeding my patience far too frequently. This issue could be just down to the absence of European players prior to the game’s launch but a torrent of American accents in play leads me to believe this could be a matchmaking issue rather than one of population. I also encountered connection issues but not anything like what has been reported in the US, so Sony appears to be getting to grips with that particular teething problem
Twisted Metal asks a lot from its players and on balance I’d say that this is perhaps too much. The tough learning curve, the uninspired single player options and the complexity of controls all take a great deal of time to get over.
Persevere and head online and you will eventual be rewarded with a multiplayer game of depth and one that is very playable and dare I say it, enjoyable.
Format: Playstation 3
Developer: Eat Sleep Play; Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
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