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| Summary: Over-the-top car smashing fun
90
This is a very fast, fun, madcap (insane?) game where you drive a monster garage-type vehicle around attacking everything in your path. Although the basics are pretty obvious - drive around, pick up ammo and shoot stuff - the game is actually pretty intricate, and loads on the complexity with special key sequences, mini games and mystery objects than endow special powers to the holder. Although this gives the game a lot of depth and potential, it jacks up the learning curve for us mere mortals.
The single player mode apparently has a story to it, but I haven't found one yet - but that does not matter too much, the game is fun anyway! The character descriptions in the manual read suspiciously like they've been translated from Japanese, not in terms of their quality but in terms of their weirdness! If the story really does unfold as I progress that will be good, but for now, this is a stateless death match type game for me.
On the negative side, I really get the feeling that I'm missing a lot of the potential of the game because I keep on dying too quickly. It's only by playing it again and again that you get to learn what all the various power-ups do and learn appropriate circuits to run on the maps. I'm a FPS death match veteran and I've never come across such complicated, multi-level ways to destroy other players. Note that I wrote "destroy" and not "kill": there's no blood or guts in this game as far as I know, just mechanical mayhem and twisted metal (yep, that's the title). However, the game is good enough to keep me coming back to it to try and learn this stuff - for now anyway. Update: If you get enough power-ups they carry over from level to level and it's possible to survive a lot easier. This makes for a hard start but at least I'm not dying so quickly!
Just like the rest of the game, the violence is completely over the top. Your whole car can get frozen like an ice cube, flamed with napalm, rammed, electrocuted, drop huge distances and yet recover if you grab a blue cross health pack. Everyone's health hovers over his or her car and there is a certain amount of satisfaction in pursuing the guy who's low on it and nailing him. Unfortunately, everything happens so fast for me, I'm never really sure what I'm nailing him with - It might be a fire missile, or napalm, I'm never really sure! The only weapon that doesn't seem to do much damage is the machine gun that's standard on everyone's car although it can be upgraded to be more powerful. When you begin this game I recommend getting the heavily armored vehicles so you survive long enough to learn how to play.
Graphics-wise, the game ranks high, but not as high as say Ridge Racer IMO. The menus and loading screens are a little low-res, very green and full of irritating warnings not to remove the Memory Stick but the actual game play is native resolution and looks great although the textures are not very realistic. Having said that, nothing in this game is really meant to be realistic anyway!
Twisted Metal has three types of multiplayer, online, LAN and peer-to-peer, of which I've only played the online one (can't find a fellow PSP player yet around here!). The online connection hooks up to a server on the Internet and there are 4 lobbies, North, South, East and West, which seem to relate to your geographic location, but you can choose any of them. You then pick a game from the ones running or start your own. I found this particularly hit and miss. Sometimes I'd connect and get to play, other times, the game would bomb out with an error saying my wireless connection wasn't working properly. As far as I can tell, there's no problem with my connection and the issue was something to do with the game itself. UPDATE: The "Message of the Day" on the server now says that they are upgrading the servers to improve performance. I got on last night without a problem and played some exceptionally fun games.
Anyway, if you do get a game going, it is very fun. There's a huge number of options for the game creator (wow, it's easy to forget this is all for a portable game system and not a PC) such as changing what type of weapons are allowed, setting games to be coop, last man standing, team-based, etc. In this respect, if you like online shooting games, you'll really like the opportunities this game provides. For me, the online play was THE reason I bought this game. I love multiplayer and wanted to use the WLAN on my PSP.
Although this game is fun, it doesn't get 100 points from me for three reasons:
1. The online multiplayer kept on kicking be off for unknown reasons (others have found this problem too) UPDATE: This seems to be fixed now.
2. The graphics are good, but not amazing.
3. It's a little too complicated and has a steep learning curve.
However, it does get 90 points because it is fun and I love the online multiplayer.
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5
