At the end of the day, vehicular combat is fun.
Since no one ever really played Twisted Metal games for their award-winning stories, let's dive right in to the gameplay. As was the case in the original PSOne games, each vehicle has its own main gun and special weapons. However, outside of that, your main method of attack will be the multitude of weapon power-ups that are lying around the field. One of the coolest aspects of the new Twisted Metal is that the weapon power-ups are pretty much the same as you remember them. You can pick up missiles, homing missiles, mines, freeze rays, shields, and even some new items like a one-shot-kill sniper rifle. Using them feels just like it did in the classic games of the series. While the control scheme is admittedly a little hard to grasp (pretty much every button and stick on the controller is used for something-and at the same time) the very concept of vehicle-based combat is the same. With a little bit of practice you'll be doing missile drive-bys, turnaround homing strikes, and dirty freeze ray assaults that make your opponents fall to their doom.
Unlike previous Twisted Metal games, your vehicles aren't determined by the characters you play. Instead every character (characters are more like factions at this point) has access to every vehicle in the game. Unfortunately, this means that there aren't a whole lot of characters to choose from. You can choose from between three factions in the single-player and four in multiplayer, and that's really it. The choice is basically entirely cosmetic as well. Do you want to play as Sweet Tooth, Doll Face, or Mr. Grimm. Doesn't really matter, because you'll get the same abilities either way.
The single-player portion of the game is actually quite enjoyable. The story is told through live-action cutscenes that seem like something out of a grindhouse flick. Blood flies everywhere while characters spit out predictably cheesy lines. It has a real B-movie feel to it. The truthfully terrible story barely makes any sense, only increasing that feel and somehow making the game better.
Most of the time you are tasked with simply killing everything around you, but the single-player does have a few curveballs to throw your way. Sometimes you'll be forced into cage matches where you'll do battle in a confined area or lose health, and other times you'll be challenged to battle races, which ask you to come in first rather than slaughter your opponents. There are also some rather epic battles with bosses that are God of War-scale in size. I also personally enjoyed the juggernaut battles, which task you with taking down a truck that repeatedly spawns enemies for you, making the gamer almost feel like an RTS. Add this together with your normal basket of jumps and explosions and you have a recipe for a pretty solid single-player campaign.
There is one problem though: the A.I. is too perfect. It's hard to program bots in games like this, and it shows. The A.I. in this game will murder you-and hard. Their aim is perfect, even from long distances, and your opponents always seem to know exactly where you are on the map as well.
To regain health, you need to either pick up a health power-up, drive into the back of a health semi which will regen your health as it drives, or park at a garage. Parking at a garage lets you change vehicles in the middle of battle while your other vehicles heal up. You aren't confined to the ground either, as you'll eventually take control of a helicopter to rain death down on your enemies. Unfortunately, there are some throwaway vehicles with health so low that the A.I. will pick them apart easily.
Multiplayer modes are all pretty standard, with the simplest mode being the classic deathmatch and the most unique mode being "Nuke," where you have to capture an enemy team leader, strap them to a missile, and blow up a burning effigy of them. Strangely enough, the fun battle-race and cage match modes in the single-player campaign are nowhere to be found in multiplayer. You can play the singleplayer in co-op mode, but this doesn't even compare to the huge online battles you can put together. It's strange that the developers would keep these two aspects of the game separate.
However, the sheer premise of the game keeps me coming back. At the end of the day, vehicular combat is fun. Unlike all the kart racing games we have played over the years, Twisted Metal is just about blowing your opponents up, and that's simply an enjoyable pastime. The power-up management and vehicle selection give the game a sort of arcade feel that you just don't get in modern shooter games. Despite all its flaws, this game feels, at its core, like a true Twisted Metal title, and, to this day, Twisted Metal is pretty much the only franchise to get excessively violent vehicle combat right.