Review RossBonaime 2/5 · Mar 22, 2020
Growing up with Playstation consoles, I rented my fair share of Twisted Metal games. I must've rented the original Playstation games multiple times, and I remember Twisted Metal: Black as one of the few games to actually unsettle me. Many years ago, I decided to pick up Twisted Metal on the Playstation 3, finally giving myself an opportunity to dig …
Growing up with Playstation consoles, I rented my fair share of Twisted Metal games. I must've rented the original Playstation games multiple times, and I remember Twisted Metal: Black as one of the few games to actually unsettle me. Many years ago, I decided to pick up Twisted Metal on the Playstation 3, finally giving myself an opportunity to dig into this franchise I had only dabbled in previously.
I think a reason I never purchased and cared much for Twisted Metal as a franchise is because it seemed like a collection of truly disturbing characters placed into a game concept that didn't deserve them. I have to imagine Twisted Metal was created as sort of an extreme middle of the Venn diagram for people who enjoyed Mario Kart and Unreal Tournament. Yet playing Twisted Metal, I couldn't help but notice that not much had changed since the Playstation days, and what had changed was only for the worse.
This truly feels like a game for people with nostalgia for the original Playstation, as it looks and plays exactly the same. I found the controls to be too convoluted for its own good, and while the game kept telling me how to do certain new tricks, I never had much of a reason to use these techniques or even care to find out why I needed these new tools.
In all honestly, I gave up this game about two-thirds in, after realizing how little I cared about the story, how bored I was with the repetitive nature of gameplay and levels and how the game would randomly ratchet up the difficulty to an almost unplayable degree. Around the time I had to fight off limo drivers while setting off nuclear bombs to hit a giant doll-faced woman, all of which was extremely hard to do all at once, I gave up out of sheer annoyance.
But the strangest thing to me as a passive admirer of Twisted Metal for years is how this even seems like a step backwards. As I mentioned earlier, the greatest tool Twisted Metal had to offer was great characters, and in the story mode, the player is relegated to one character that is chosen for you. Seeing the various cars from the franchise in the battlegrounds made me miss the opportunity to play as the strange characters that had been created throughout this franchise, and by limiting that, this franchise clearly doesn't know what works and what doesn't.
It's also wild just how little this franchise has evolved. Gameplay is more intense, convoluted and difficult to comprehend in the moment, and I have to imagine this is an attempt to give the player more of a frenetic experience, without concern for how fun that might actually be. I couldn't help but wish that this idea could be simplified, maybe a Burnout with weapons, or something of a similar sort? With the way this franchise fizzled out after this release, I have to imagine Twisted Metal's inability to evolve left most fans feeling like they were seeing a worse version of the same thing they'd seen time and time again.
Which is a shame, considering that the characters and world are intriguing and the fact that there's seemingly nothing the developer wants to do but put them in the same exact game over again is a complete waste. I'd love to see these characters finally appear in a game that does them justice, outside of the world of mediocre vehicular combat. There has always been promising ideas in this franchise, but they've been stuck under a boring interface for too many years to let them shine.