Twisted Metal X (PS3)

I've been dreading and fearing this game since the gameplay videos started coming out. Flying Sweet Tooth and Iron Maiden battles.. it seemed like they were dropping the car combat that made it great. I finally picked up the game and have to say the videos don't do it justice. They show far too much of the changes and stuff to entice new players, but as a long-term fan (from #1) I have to say, it's not as changed and different as the videos make it seem.

The classic deathmatches are still there, and even more hardcore. The controls are customisable and I ended up going for the dual stick TM:Black control layout which worked fantastically. People are complaining about the short story, but it's pretty challenging and takes about as long as any modern shooter game, also you tend to play these shooter games for multiplayer and quick matches rather than story.

The issues with lack of games online is fairly true, that's mostly because not enough people are playing and that's mostly due to the marketing putting them off as it put me off for so long. Ranked games prevent you from joining already running games, and unranked allow people to hop in and out, but because there's so much to unlock in ranked, very few play unranked. I agree this is a pity, but I hope a patch is released or DLC to buy characters you haven't unlocked so that more people can play unranked with their favourite characters.

This game is extremely dark. The darkest non-horror game (as in it's not marketed as horror, like say FEAR) I've played in decades. The cut scenes are stylised with very horrific effect, and the I found myself far more interested in the plot than I expected.

The main complaint about this game is the marketing. They went full-on with marketing this, but marketed the wrong elements. The single level with flying missiles at giant robots should NOT be what you show repeatedly when the game is still mostly a deathmatch car game with pick-up weapons. The DLC online pass is moronic. It always has been moronic in other games, but is all the more moronic here. It means you have less players online. It means people that find that the game isn't for them can't sell it to people that would like to play it. It doesn't stop 2nd hand sales, it just means there are more second hand buyers with broken functionality. I bought an online pass for £1.50 on ebay, so I'm not entirely sure what the system accomplishes.

Also, this game NEEDS a demo. Demos are what introduced me to the franchise in the first play. If I didn't play a few round of a deathmatch I wouldn't have become addicted and had to buy the games. So why they only did a temporary demo that didn't work properly and then immediately expired, is beyond me. If I had tried the demo, perhaps I'd have realised how good the game was and would've bought it sooner.

Give it a rent, try a few deathmatches and if you're an old school fan, give it a go with classic control layout. I've been recently playing the original games, and the graphics do not hold up, the online server of Black is gone, and the 2012 Twisted Metal game is the only way to recapture that.

For all those with found of memories Twisted Metal Black on the PS2 this will not disopoint, all the old character are there with a few new edition's to spice things up with lots of new maps to get your teeth into.
This game allso add's background storys to some of the main characters with out them getting in the way or over engineering the game, the only down sides to the new game and that my favorite character 'the reverand's ' special wepon dosent fling a bond body wile shouting REPENT!! but chucks a whole coffin whichdosent have the same affect, and i really miss the first few bars of the stones 'Black' as the game kicks in, but there's are little point and the game is still grate.

Let me start my review by saying - this is classic Twisted Metal updated for the current generation graphically, perhaps not so much in physics, but that by no means makes this a bad game. The problems with it come from its severely short single-player length and multitude of multi-player issues.

The last TM game I played was Black for the PS2. The European version was cut so severely that it simply served as a number of death-matches stuck together with absolutely no story. Thankfully, that issue isn't present here, but we are left with a 3 limited stories following Sweet Tooth, Mr Grimm & Dollface. All of the tales are interesting enough and I really enjoyed watching the live-action cutscenes, but they were very short and easy to progress through (and there were only about 3-4 cutscenes per character anyway). The meat of the story mode is in the matches themselves - traditional TM vehicular carnage in death-matches, electric cage matches, that sort of thing. There's varying levels of difficulty - up to "Twisted" which is horrifically hard, but generally playing on normal you'll have a good time. There's also a 'challenge' mode, where you can choose the map, game mode and settings you want to play against bots, which adds some slight longevity to the single player. Finally, you can play offline splitscreen or LAN matches, which is a very nice addition to keep the series close to its roots.

The actual game itself is a lot of fun - like I mentioned earlier, it's classic Twisted Metal. The environments seem very destructible and the weapons are a lot of fun. The controls can take a bit of getting used to, but thankfully you can change the control scheme to either original Twisted Metal or the dual-stick mode from Twisted Metal Black, which I chose to use. One thing you will notice is the physics are often way off - cars go flying all over the place sometimes, but I count this as more of a nostalgic nod to the older games and as such don't really have a problem with it.

So despite all this praise, how come I ended up giving the game 3 stars out of 5? The answer is quite simple - the online multi-player is completely broken at the moment. At the time of writing (21/04/12), I cannot connect to the online servers at all - I have to log out of my PSN just to play the single player. Hopefully this issue will be solved with another patch (I'm led to believe that the recent 1.05 patch is what caused this problem in the first place), but for the time being I'm completely unable to play online which is a massive problem. Even when I was able to connect before the patch, there were many server issues and disconnects which made the experience a hassle.

It's a real shame, because the actual game itself is huge amounts of fun, the kind of carnage which you can only seem to find with Twisted Metal games. It feels like a product which needed 3-6 more months in development to iron out the problems with online play and beef up the single player campaign.

Just a small final note: The game requires an pass to play online if you weren't already aware (if the online servers ever get up and running again!) Buying the game new, I also got two redeemable vouchers - one for a free downloadable version of Twisted Metal Black (which is still a lot of fun), and one for a Sweet Tooth skin for the upcoming game 'Starhawk'.