Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Broken"

Twisted metal is the awaited nex gen entry in this classic car combat franchise.

I was and still am a big fan of the old twisted metal games (specially the ones on PSX) so for the firt few days I really loved this game. Gameplay should feel familiar to people who have played previous Twisted Metal games and despite having a somewhat complex learning curve and using every single button in the controller (including sixaxis) you get used to it after a few hours and everything starts working great.

The story mode sadly is very bried and can be finished in about 2 hours. It's just a mix of matches versus bots using different game modes, plus 3 boss battles that are quite fun and chalenging on the harder dificulties.
Some events work better than others, deathmatch is allways fun but the new "racing events" are too chaotic and most of the time rely to much on luck and too liitle on skill. Also, the AI allways seems to be more focused on making the player loose than "winning" the event. In the same races for example, a lot of times you will see the AI doing stuff that will obviously make them loose the race only to make something harmfull to the player, and deathmatches are more 8vs1 events than anything else. But overall it's fun little Story mode with a good amount of challenge and a fun story to watch (made with real life actors and CGI backrounds).

Staying true to the Twisted Metal formula, Splitscreen is back. You can play different game modes with up to 3 people (4 in total) at he same time and the story mode can also be played by 2 people via splitscreen


But overall a lot of the focus seemed to go to the multiplayer and the intention was obviously for the multiplayer to be the aspect of the game to give us countless gaming hours.
In the end, the multiplayer is a lot of fun....... when it works. And sadly the connection issues and stupid design choices keep this game from being truly great.

There some balance issues, with cars with a lot of health having more advantage over fast cars. Some of the most resistent cars are almost impossible to take on 1 on 1 because you will probably run out of guns before being able to do any real damage.

But that could have been overlooked if it wasn't for the horrible connection and design problems.
Connection errors while trying to join matches are constant (even after several patches), yet the biggest problem is that there is no autostart so 80% of the online matches you join will just never start because the host left or is AFK. The combination of these 2 issues that where never fixed results in the fact that every hour you try to play online will be 30 min searching for a working match and 30 min of actually playing. And this issues slowly started to kill the online comunity.
As someone who studies and has a part time job I get what it is like to not have all the time in the world to play videogames. And if I can take 1 hours of my day to play something online I'd like it to be spent actually playing and not watching connection error screens and neverending lobby screens.


If you love the saga and have a lot of people to play with then this might be a good game to pick up. Overall it's still a fun experience.
But for people looking forward to spend a lot of time playing this online it's hard for me to recommend.

I really wanted to love this game, and it make me sad to see that all the stuff that I was expecting are actually there, but sadly some bad connection issues and some idiotic design choice that where never fixed just ended up ruining the experience.