An original vehicular combat title, is Twisted Metal worth playing 30 years later?
What Is It? The year is 2005 and the tenth annual Twisted Metal competition is about to begin. Run by the mysterious Calypso, a group of twelve contestants are ready to go in their custom rides. Select one and enter the arena where the last car standing wins.
In this third person driving game released in 1995, you will navigate around small to medium-sized levels attempting to blow up all other contestants in that round. The amount of contestants varies by level, but the goal is the same; destroy them all.
The game has forward, reverse, and turbo buttons for moving your ride. You can also move in forward or reverse using up and down on the d-pad. Each vehicle can fire a machine gun and weapons. The machine gun only does light damage and is prone to overheating with overuse. Weapons range from missiles to traps to unique per-character special attacks. Special attacks get replenished automatically, while all other weapons need to be acquired by finding them in the play area.
The only other real mechanic in play here are health filling stations scattered across each level. You can use them to replenish a decent bit of your health. Afterwards, they will be inactive for a while before becoming available again.
You need to clear six levels and a final boss to complete the game. You will have a set number of lives based on what difficulty you selected. The game offers passwords between levels so you can jump back in at any point instead of starting from scratch each time. Attempting to beat the game without passwords or save states (when playing through PS Plus) is a truly difficult challenge.
Twisted Metal is a great example of good, dumb, videogame fun. There isn’t a whole lot going on here, but it is still great to hop in Outlaw, a police car, and zap everyone around you with its taser. Or send enemies spinning with Sweettooth’s, the famous ice cream truck, special attack. Using large vehicles to overpower and batter smaller ones, or using smaller ones to escape and sneak up on the larger, slower vehicles. There isn’t a lake’s worth of depth to this game, but there is enough to make it worth jumping into for an hour or so every now and then to see how far you can get with a new character.
The maps are basic but work just fine. They at least try some interesting things with a level on a freeway, another spread across rooftops, and so on. Each has some destructible environmental elements and secrets to find.
The Best Part: Blowing up a bunch of vehicles with a variety of missiles and special moves is, quite simply, an extremely fun thing to do. Adding colorful characters to the mix and a bizarrely grotesque shadow figure running the whole thing, Calypso, only adds to the flavor and fun here. Sometimes a dead simple concept can be great and carry a game.
The Worst Part: The existence of the sequels. If you love exactly what Twisted Metal has to offer then you are certainly better off playing the direct sequel; Twisted Metal II. If you love this game and want something also great but a little different, go for Twisted Metal 4. If you want a generational leap or two, the excellent Twisted Metal Black (PS2) and Twisted Metal 2012 (PS3) are both options. If you want this game but with RC cars, you are also in luck because Twisted Metal: Small Brawl is a thing that exists. If you like the characters but wish they were brought to life in a live action series starring Captain America and Rosa Diaz, well, I’ve got news for you!
The Verdict: It’s tough reviewing the forefather of a genre when there are decades’ worth of games following in its footsteps, including many direct sequels. Obviously, since it spawned so many imitations, it was a great game. On the other hand, who is actually itching to play the original Twisted Metal in 2026? Me, apparently!
One reason to play this game is that it is on PlayStation Plus and has trophies. That is why I decided to revisit the classic. (The trophy list is simple with the use of save states and passwords, for the record, it won’t take more than a few hours). Note that this is the original game, just emulated onto the PS Plus streaming service, not a remake or remaster.
Outside of that, maybe you just want to see the origin of this niche genre that kind of doesn’t exist these days?
Regardless of the reasoning, Twisted Metal is still a good time today. You’ll need to spend 30 minutes getting used to the controls and also find your preferred vehicles because some of them are truly awful for me, but there is fun to be had. You can do a lot worse than sinking a few hours into blowing up ice cream trucks and motorcycles across a variety of maps.
How to Play: PlayStation 1/4/5*
*console played on for this review
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