Review: Twisted Metal (PS3)

Posted by Angry Tom in Featured, Gaming, Opinion | 9 comments

Hey guys. Angry Tom here, and I just finished playing the new Twisted Metal. Well I finished TRYING to play the new Twisted Metal. I’ll explain.

I’m a big long-time fan of the Twisted Metal series. Super fast and tight car combat with destructible environments and dark twisted characters and barely any plot. Good stuff right? Well after a very long delay the new TM game limps out into the open.

Despite a long development time, this game feels clunky and unpolished. The scale is a bit off and all the cars are roughly half the size of the houses, the textures and overall detail is decidedly last-gen, and the controls are a frickin’ travesty.

Controls

One of the most important elements of TM is the controls. Getting around, turning on a dime and executing complex moves are how you get ahead in the game. But David Jaffe and the Devil must have sat down for coffee because this is the worst control scheme I’ve seen in a racer, car-combat, or possibly ANY game, EVER. A complicated and finger breaking series of stupidly thought-out button presses are required for just about anything. Simply accelerating and steering, turbo and jumping, the very simple concepts that most games have locked down for 20 years is now OUT the window. There’s different button combos to burst forward and backward. There’s two and three part button combos to simply fire a weapon or a special weapon.

We took 3 avid gamers, all fans of Twisted Metal and put them through the tutorial phase. Then let them play 3 rounds of the game. Every single one of them gave up in complete disgust. While I’m sure a serious applied effort could make the control scheme work, it frankly enraged me. It was so oblique and obscure and away from any standard of game that exists today that it felt pompous and pretentious. It’s just utter shit, I’m sorry, but it’s true. It makes the older TM games seem that much more distant and missed by the fans. This is a deal-breaker to me.

Graphics

As stated, the graphics are not quite up to par. While everything is relatively sharp, and the speed and combination of things smashing and exploding onscreen are certainly impressive. There was too much sacrifice in general quality, textures and density. Some of the levels get gigantic but there’s nothing of particular interest. The style just feels a bit tired and bland and uninspired. The frame-rate remains rock solid and there’s still a sick glee to smashing through a building, guns-a-blazing. The removal of most of the characters and therefore variety along with the generic level building and sparse design comes up short for me.

Gameplay

Now down to a cast of Three (?!), while the excellent and fun voice acting (and Sweet Tooth in particular) are still in effect the game itself feels a bit weird. Now it’s Sweet Tooth, Mr. Grimm and Dollface, each with their own ‘faction’ of clones to fight on their behalf. I can’t agree with this decision there was so much zany variety in earlier games, not just in the vehicles, but in the characters and their personalities in-game and in cut-scenes between the gameplay. Now it’s distilled into a super small group of people with a gang behind them. It all feels impersonal and cheap. Thank god they kept some fan-favorites but I miss the rest of the gang severely.

Couple that with a flying helicopter vehicle and zany gameplay modes and while it’s iterative to the old games it doesn’t innovate in any positive way. Twisted Metal Black was a beautiful transition to the PS2 that felt pretty and right and like a natural progression. This feels like an overdue jarring left-turn in the series that abandons great things and focuses on overly complicated silly things in a combination that spells disappointment.

Sound

The Voice acting remains solid for the few and proud that are left, and the rest of the music and sound effects while serviceable, aren’t anything to write home about.  There’s so many corners cut here that this game feels more like a downloadable game by the minute.

Generally

As you may have noticed, I’m angry Tom, and I’m angry. I had to come out and give my two cents on this game because while it has some mixed reviews everyone seems to ‘Want’ to like it. No one seems to have acknowledged the worst goddamned control scheme in gaming history, no one wants to mention that this game had huge conflicts during development and is a day late and a dollar short. The reviewers out there that gave this 80 and 90 percent are clearly fanboys/girls who remember how awesome Twisted Metal used to be and are applying a fine coat of nostalgia directly to this new game which I personally would feel a little jilted paying 20 bucks for, not to speak of 50 or 60.

If they re-worked the controls – COMPLETELY – and threw in some bonus characters or DLC to bring back our missing favorite characters, I could see this at least standing alongside the Twisted Metal saga with a passing grade. As it stands now, it’s junky trash that feels insulting and makes me want to go digging for my copy of Twisted Metal: Black so I can play a real game.

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