Twisted Metal is a game developed by SingleTrac for Sony Computer Entertainment for the Playstation 1 console, the first in a franchise of long running exclusive games as well as being one of my personal favorite franchises ever. I won’t go too long into this game’s development (as I’ll post the documentary found on Twisted Metal: Head On - Extra Twisted Edition for the PS2), but the basic gist is that David Jaffe (one of the designers of the game as well as the creator I believe of the God of War series) pissed off a lot of people and was told to make a game with these guys or else that’s kind of the end of the line. They originally came up with the concept after imagining blowing up a highway full of vehicles after being stuck in traffic. It originally went under other names like Urban Assault and High Octane (of which whose name can still be seen in the first arena in the beginning of the game) before settling on Twisted Metal and developed this game alongside another title, Warhawk, while also dealing with technical limitations as well as with budgetary ones: one “blunder” included live action endings, which were supposed to be in and we’re directed by David Jaffe but were dismissed due to poor quality and “offensive content”, which to be honest I wish they were included as they contributed to the campy tone, but we’re instead replaced with text scrawls which is less interesting. It was released to mixed-to positive reviews and sold enough to land on the Playstation’s Greatest Hits. My history with the series mainly started due to me hearing about it on Youtube and picking up Twisted Metal: Head On - Extra Twisted Edition and loving that, when I got older I bought each game in the series one by one but I haven’t sat down and really played them much but decided to hunker down and try this game out for a couple of days, and these are the thoughts I pulled out of it.


The plot of this game is a rather simple and short one: an enigmatic and mysterious burn victim named Calypso who lives underneath the streets in the city of Los Angeles is hosting a competition called Twisted Metal, which is hosting its 10th annual contest in the city above. According to the game manual, each contestant got an email from Calypso asking them in a simple, flashing red message: WILL YOU DRIVE? The main goal of this competition is for everyone to destroy one another, in which the final one standing will get any wish of their desire, no matter how big or small it is (though often times, moreso in Twisted Metal 2 and on he will attempt to twist the wish back onto the winner to screw them over in some way). You’ll have characters like Specter, who just wants to come back to life in the flesh after being killed by “a serial killer clown at a carnival”; Outlaw, a cop who wants to take Calypso down and save lives (a far cry from what modern day police do lol), and you’ll get evil characters like Sweet Tooth, a serial killer clown who joined the competition to “find his best friend” which in a humorous twist at his ending ends up being a paper bag named Harold the Wacky Lunch Sack or some shit. As you could probably tell due to the clown on the cover, Sweet Tooth (aka Needles Kane) IS the mascot for the franchise, the main draw if you will. In every single game he’s one of if not the main feature and the contestant connected the most to the other contestants in some way, mostly through his serial murder sprees and sheer evil brutality. The only thing I can really mention in this section is that I appreciate the pictures of each contestant are strapped to the walls of the first level in the game, a small arena in which you fight one other person; another tip is if you play the game on Hard difficulty and destroy the glass roof you can get a secret level: this first level arena but you fight against five other contestants. It’s really difficult however and you don’t get anything from winning it so whether that matters or not is up to you.

The gameplay is basically this: you play as one of twelve vehicles, each driven by a contestant and your job is to pick up weapons on the battlefield and become the last man standing. As such you’ll be able to pick up weapons such as your machine gun (which has infinite ammo but is on a cooldown) weak fire missiles (which can aim a little bit but won’t always home in), powerful Homing (which are the most accurate) and Power missiles (which are the best kind of weapons but have no homing capability whatsoever, making accuracy important; mines, rear missiles and rear flamethrower in order to damage opponents who are on your ass, tire spikes which is supposed to slow down these opponents when ran over, oil slicks which make them spin out. I feel that the freeze missile is the biggest pain in the ass, but it’s useful for holding an enemy down in place while you can get a free hit off of a different weapon. You can also pick up turbo markers (which get you super speed, and you press the Triangle button to start it up) as well as the catapults which launch you or your enemy into the air if you’re looking to throw your opponent off balance or jump to a different area. You can also run around to certain areas of the minimap (which also detect which enemies are nearby due to a colored dot, though it’s painfully simple with no streets shown on this map) and drive up to health stations (marked as a plus sign on the minimap), which can be used only sparingly as well as by other contestants so you have to kind of think strategically in that regard. Now keep in mind, this game is difficult in both actual game ways and also kind of general jank; to address some of the gameplay difficulty stuff first I’ll start by saying that the controls can get some getting used to. Mix that in with a camera that stays on your back more than shit on stink, sometimes moving around can be difficult; sometimes you’ll be able to drift really well, and sometimes you’ll end up smacking into walls repeatedly, while backing up isn’t exactly smooth either and requires you to hold down on the D-Pad, either pressing the circle button.

There are no analog controls (which I’m not sure was around back then), and any movement you make will be with the D-Pad which can make the driving feel really stiff, leaving you open to enemy attacks if you really don’t know what you’re doing, It gets a bit better the more you play but I don’t think that I ever really got used to it enough where I got comfortable, though I did get used to drifting. If you want a general control scheme for the game (of which you can change to three or so different control schemes if you want something different, though you can’t change buttons), I’ll put some stuff down here now:

X button is to drift
Circle is to stop/reverse
Triangle is to activate turbo
Start is to change angle (like first person driving, or zooming in right behind the car; though if you activate the helicopter view cheat in certain areas you can see your vehicle from a camera angle above the map; cool but impractical)
Select button is pause
L1/R1 is to switch weapons
R2 is to shoot machine guns
L2 is to shoot off your weapon of choice


With this in mind, if you’re going to start up a character I would recommend either Roadkill, Outlaw or Thumper; they’re pretty reliable with their mobility while other vehicles like Hammerhead and Darkside are heavier and more powerful but the handling isn’t the best. I would also say DO NOT choose Sweet Tooth as your first vehicle, he’s the most popular but jumping into Sweet Tooth as your first run isn’t recommended as he also doesn’t have the greatest handling. On top of that however, the enemies felt like they kind of banded together to gang up on me sometimes, which mixed in with the controls felt kind of frustrating unless I threw on cheat codes beforehand; and keep in mind not only are your opponents trying to kill you but you’ll also have random people (Called Refs in the game’s manual) shoot at you with machine guns and missiles from the ground as well. Now, thankfully for the most part you can kill them with ease but they can also hit you when you’re not paying attention and let me tell you health is precious in this game; though what I will mention is that you can run over innocent civilians as well littered about the stages (though thankfully not the dog located in River Park Rumble). The final boss, Minion, can also be a bitch and a half as the final boss as an armored up tank who has the specials of almost everyone in the game; now it is doable if you can get it just right and keep your distance BUT luckily there is a bit of a cheese for this game if need be towards the end. However, I had some difficulty locating weapon respawns sometimes when playing this game, especially on the final level which takes place on a series of rooftops and that can be frustrating as well with only one health recharge and three enemies beforehand. Another thing is that in this game, your progress relies on two things: it has a life system (in which you can die three times or else you fail) as well as a password system. Now this password system not only dictates the gameplay cheats (like invincibility/infinite ammo), but also a level system as well (with the beginning of each level putting down their own code which you could either write down or use a guide on the internet for later use) so you can get back to these points but it doesn’t rely on a save system but it’s a system of the old days so it can be kind of archaic in certain points. Other things to mention non difficulty wise is that the physics can sometimes be fucky, for example you can blow up another vehicle and crash right into them and you’ll kind of be thrown everywhere. Getting stuck on another vehicle or thrown around can be a death sentence, especially if there are other vehicles nearby. It can be really easy to flip over, get stuck on car wrecks and acquire damage because of this as well so it’s important to be both patient as well as aware of your environment constantly at all times. With enough practice and if you decide to play through the game legitimately it can work out if you have a lot of patience, but also if you decide to play with cheats, I don’t really blame you as they’re readily available and I did after a while.

The only other gameplay feature that I can think of but forgot about is the two player duel stuff; playing the game by myself I didn’t really have anyone to play it with so I didn’t bother trying but my guess is that it’s a split screen experience with just you and your couch buddy with no NPCs. However I could be wrong about the NPCs, it was a common inclusion at the time and makes sense considering the time; maybe one day I’ll give it a shot.

The soundtrack/graphics/atmosphere/art design is as follows here: as always the PS1 graphics are a weak point for me that I can’t help but love. It was 1995 when the game debuted and as the studio’s first title with this ambitious concept, it’s not necessarily a surprise that you can tell that it’s a bit on the cheap side due to similar effects like the explosion/fire effect looking like it came straight out of an FMV film. Keep in mind, it’s no complaint as they had to do what they could for the time and as someone from the future looking back on how this game feels it really fits right in with the wacky sort of tone they had going for it. If there was a downside it’s that sometimes the environment looks a bit choppy, like seeing black lines connecting certain pieces of the environment, the draw distance being poor and pop in only appearing when you’re right next to a different area in the map and yet again the frame rate being a bit on the lower end so if you’re a stickler for 60 FPS then you’re going to HATE this game. Oftentimes you’ll drive by a wall (or hop over) and see underneath the map as well as building textures; which again I’m not complaining about as it adds a sort of throwback charm to games of the old age like that. The tone of the game is one that’s goofy, and not to be taken seriously however; the contestants themselves are eccentric looking; with Sweet Tooth is of course a creepy clown with his clothes drooping about and Calypso himself, who is supposed to be a burn victim, looks like really weird face paint due to low budget constraints. If one were to watch the lost FMV videos (which I’ll put in the links below), it was definitely a low budget thing, which again adds to the charm of it all. The soundtrack is a sort of old rock feel that legitimately slaps and adds to the whole atmosphere of the game as well, and really helps make this game more memorable amongst the other titles as one of the better soundtracks in the series.

Finally, we’re at the finish line with one last question: Is it worth playing? Honestly, I don’t really know, I guess it’s down to perspective. I decided to pick this game up because of a couple reasons: to knock out the backlog and get my one game per console thing done (with this being my PS1 of the year though I’ll play others), to get footage for a friend of mine who might do a video in the future, and also because the Twisted Metal series on Peacock is coming out soon (and it doesn’t really look that good from that one clip I saw). With all of that in mind, I genuinely like this game not only for its atmosphere and endearing jank but due to the fact that it’s the first in one of my favorite video game series of all time. However, I can acknowledge that I’m also looking at it through rose tinted glasses; it’s a very jank game that doesn’t have too much in the way of features, proper endings, the lack of destruction compared to the other entries in the series, it can be kind of difficult sometimes due to the game’s balancing (or lack thereof), again lots of different issues. I’ll say I do recommend it, with the caveat that it’s a game that is noticeably old and came out the next year after the Playstation 1 came out in December of 1994. Put it on maybe for some nostalgia, have a giggle, maybe have a couch co-op session and play with some friends; it deserves respect for its place but I don’t see myself coming back to it except for the casual aspect or to collect footage again. But in the end that’s ok, I had myself some fun and that’s all I can ask for in a game sometimes, but it’s been done better in the subsequent sequels; if you want to try to play the game now you could either try to get it on the PS3 digital store for between 5-10 dollars, get a PS1 copy for around 20-60 dollars approximately depending on the edition, or if you’re on PC you could download the Abandonware copy that came from Japan. If I’m missing anything as well, I’ll try my best to update the review later at a different point to fill in any missing information, but I'm basing my review on my time completing all twelve character's stories.

Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_phm0uvThtk&ab_channel=PolandBizkit (Soundtrack)
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/twisted-metal-bf2 (Abandonware PC Port)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY2tSSblO94&ab_channel=TacticalBaconProductions (Minion Cheese, start from 25:28)
https://www.liveabout.com/twisted-metal-cheats-3409267 (Cheat Codes)
https://oldgamesdownload.com/wp-content/uploads/Twisted_Metal_Manual_PS_EN.pdf (Manual PDF)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u47jyl07fDU&ab_channel=bdcool213 (Twisted Metal: The Dark Past Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tu-m5SlIw4&ab_channel=bdcool213 (Twisted Metal 1 Lost Endings/Text Endings)