David Jaffe is officially the biggest tease in the gaming industry. After telling everyone and their mother that he wasn’t going to step foot in E3 and he wasn’t working on Twisted Metal he rides in with Sweet Tooth at Sony’s E3 conference. Luckily Twisted Metal is completely worth getting jerked around for. I got a chance to play this on the floor today and it is shaping up to be exactly what the fans have been waiting for.
The demo I played was a team deathmatch game between a gang of Dollface followers and a creepy clown troop of Sweet Tooth cronies. Everything that made Twisted Metal great is back, even the unique control scheme that uses Square as the acceleration and X as the hand break which can literally turn on a dime. When speaking to Scott Campbell I asked if the controls were customizable and he said that there were several control schemes available so newcomers to the series can have more standard car driving controls.
After choosing between several vehicle types including non-cars like helicopters and motorcycles the madness began. I drove through buildings, over pedestrians, and shot exploding gurneys out of ambulances and reveled in the carnage as the drivers of the cars I destroyed burst into flames and ran around before the sweet release of death.
Each explosion and vehicular collision netted me experience which I was told would be used for online leader boards in the final release. I couldn’t get Scott to talk in any kind of detail on the single player but he did mention that it was going to have a different structure than any Twisted Metal game before it. Twisted Metal may be hard to define into a genre, but whatever genre it is I think it will almost definitely have a shot at winning awards when it releases for that genre.
Here's a video of me playing the game quite terribly if I do say so myself:
