Twisted Metal (2012)

As I said, last night was a great night for co-op video gaming. After beating Gears of War 3 with Sweeney, I watched the Bruins take a 3-0 series lead. And after that, Sheridan and I finished the recent Twisted Metal reboot we'd been playing for nearly two months. I only bought the reboot in the first place because it came with a PS3 controller in a bundle that cost ten bucks more than the controller alone, and I needed a fourth PS3 controller. (I didn't really need one, but let's pretend I did.) I'm glad I bought it, because this certainly was an interesting and mostly enjoyable reboot.

My history with the Twisted Metal series is fairly well documented on the blog. In short, I loved the first two games, didn't hate the third or fourth ones (but didn't love them, either), and never even bothered beating the fifth installment, Twisted Metal: Black, for something like ten years. When I did finally play it, in college, I admired its commitment to being utterly dark and sinister where previous games were more light-heartedly violent, but that doesn't mean I particularly enjoyed the gameplay.

Let me take an abrupt left turn here. A "reboot" is a release within an entertainment franchise that resets the franchise's established continuity. In that regard, you could kind of say that every Twisted Metal game has been a reboot to some extent; plenty of recurring characters appear in multiple games, yet each game ends with one sole surviving contestant, so, strictly speaking, none of the games take place in the same canon. When I say that this particular Twisted Metal game was a reboot, then, I mean stylistically more than anything else.

Frankly, this Twisted Metal game introduces all kinds of game modes I'd never have imagined seeing in a Twisted Metal game. Races. Pinball. Helicopter flight. I winced at a whole lot of this, and the frustration factors only made things worse. Steve and I beat just about every standard deathmatch on our first try, but when it came to the races and pinball games, we spent a great number of attempts just kind of trying to figure shit out. Another complaint I'd register is that the story mode this time around features only three playable characters. There are still plenty of vehicles, sure, but part of the charm of the old Twisted Metal games was the intrinsic link between the drivers and their cars. When Mr. Grimm is driving Sweet Tooth's ice cream truck, it just kind of feels... weird.

Still, there was plenty to like about this game, too. It was better than Twisted Metal: Black in terms of gameplay, and also better than I remember Twisted Metal 4 being. And as weird as some of the races and pinball games and gauntlet runs were, they helped breathe life and variety into a game whose entire purpose was to re-breathe life and variety into an old, once great franchise.

All in all, I approved of this reboot. I don't think this series can ever recapture that distinct charm Twisted Metal 2 had, but that's because graphical and computational enhancements in modern day systems would do a great disservice to the cartoony and campy style of the older games. For what it set out to be, Twisted Metal was a decent game.