Twisted Metal: Black

I was thinking of a game to review and I thought up that stupid tag line.  Now I have to write a review that not only is long enough to get on the site, but justifies the line and an appropriate score.  Thanks, me from two minutes ago!
 
Without going too much into the detail of the Twisted Metal series, it is suffice to say that this is a reboot of the franchise and that a lot of people have said that this was a good thing since the series sort of shot off the rails since the third game.  My personal experience with Twisted Metal stated with Twisted Metal 4, which I thought was a fun enough car combat game with some insanely cheap bosses.  But I never felt so passionately about it that I wanted to experience the earlier games.  This title is far darker than Four, and from the advertisements for the earlier ones I’ve seen, I’m going to guess the setting was darker than those as well. 
 
To justify all of this car combat, a wizard/billionaire/The Devil/alien-entity/whatever-dude named Calypso has started a tournament where the only apparent qualification is having a car, the winner of which will have one wish granted.  Which in a way is a refreshing, very egalitarian qualifier, then again since it is a tournament to the death, its understandable why most people would not want to enter.  It’s a decent enough premise, but does beg the question how potential drivers find out about the tournament.  Also curious that cops do not try to shut it down and civilians get iced all the time in this game.  It also begs the question of how Calypso proves to the participants that he can grant wishes because his wish allowance is not of the meet Madonna or a second string defensive lineman of your favorite team, but of the go back in time, bring the dead back to life variety.
 
The basic structure of the single player is pick a car, watch a cut scene setting up the driver, play through a bunch of levels eliminating all the competition, mini-boss, another cut scene further developing the character and delving into why the driver really wants that wish, more levels, destroy a massive helicopter, final cut scene.  It’s been eight years since I played it, but I cannot think of a single happy ending to the game.  At the end the driver gets his or her wish, but like in many a Twilight Zone episode or every evil genie story you can think of, the wish either backfires or is ultimately useless to the driver.  Some spoilery examples follow, the cop car guy – who probably has a name – is a police sniper who accidently killed an innocent person in a hostage situation.  His wish is to be able to relive that moment when he pulled the trigger so that he would not make the same mistake again.  Calypso grants his wish and he’s back staring down that scope and this time does not blow away the first thing that pops up in his cross hairs.  But then, as a result of not shooting, he turns the scope to another window with elation that he can live free of guilt, only to see that an armed gunman had time to spot him and BLAM!  Credits roll.  Sweet Tooth, everyone’s favorite pedophile child-murderer, was cursed with eternal pain due to his wacky adventures.  (Which is why his head is on fire constantly in this game.)  Calypso grants his wish to end the pain with a magical elixir, but in order for the curse to stay away, the clown can never kill again.  After hearing this, Sweet Tooth smashes the bottle and gives the wish granter a unnecessary, bonus bodily orifice that appears to only be good for letting out rather a lot of excess blood.  Which is sort of a happy ending, from the clown’s murdery perspective anyway.  If you’re like me and like these kinds of twists, the scenes are definitely worth playing through the game with every character.
 
However, as you could probably get all of the story off of YouTube now, the question is whether or not the game is worth playing for the combat – you know, the game part.  Essentially the game is a two-dimensional dog fighting game.  Instead of circling an opponent over and over trying to get on the other’s tail in the air, you either happen upon cars and shoot up their tailpipe, or you run past an enemy and determine whether you have the weapons to take down the car that just drove by.  If so, time for a 180 degree turn and game on, if not, keep driving away real fast and hope you can dodge all the pain headed your way.  The AI will usually pull swing around, so that’s always going to be decision.  There are certain weapons that everyone has access to.  Orange straight shootin’ missiles, less damaging but homing purple ones, cans of napalm that are lobbed in front of the car which will eventually hit something, or you can press the fire button again which will send it straight down from where it is in the arc.  The timing of this will eventually become second nature and is required to make this weapon useful.  In addition to these weapons, and more, each car also has a special ability, some of which make more sense than others.  The big Mack truck’s ability is to get a sudden jolt of speed and ram other cars seems to fit the vehicle, but the cop’s special ability is to pop up with a swivel chair on the roof of his car with another gun to shoot surrounding cars is an odd choice.  The most interesting special ability belongs to Sweet Tooth’s ice cream truck which has a giant rotating clown head on the top.  Using the special once causes the truck to transform into a crazy clown man with tires for feet and missiles for arms.  This causes the truck to handle differently as it is now top heavy and gives drivers a chance to delay shooting the salvo of missiles with an accompanying mechanical, maniacal cackle.
 
All of the standard weapons are found scattered throughout the levels as color-coded, glowing boxes.  Seemingly randomly appearing helicopters will fly along as well dangling power ups that periodically change on the end of a rope.  These helicopters help to spice things up as all drivers will tend to flock to them even if there is another fixed point for a power up nearby.  It takes time for a power up to respawn, so sometimes seeking out a helicopter is the best bet.  As one would expect, cars take damage they begin to show their wear as they get shot up and burned.  A first aid power up will instantly heal all damage and magically reattach your hanging bumper.  In addition to the specials and standard weapons, there are commands that can be entered with the D pad that will cause another kind of special.  None of these, I believe, are ever explained in game even though the AI uses them frequently.  They cannot be spammed, but they can turn the course of an encounter:  Speedy enemy, freeze ray’ll stop him; hear the screaming sound of an incoming high damage attack, try and jump straight up to let it sail on by; running like a little girl to the health pack spot, shield mode on.  One nice touch is that every car animates when the different weapons are selected.  Homing missiles might cause a compartment out of Inspector Gadget to pop out of the driver side door with a missile turret, or selecting a napalm barrel might have the trunk pop open revealing the huge can and a launcher.  The animations for every car are different and usually quite clever.  One constant seems to be that every car’s head lights double as machine guns.
 
The maps themselves are all fairly different.  A map will typically feature several roundish wide-open areas, tunnels connecting them, and traps of some sort.  In some it is something as average as a pit to knock opponents into, in others it might be a huge trash compactor that snaps shut every five seconds.  With a health pickup right in the middle to tempt you.  While nothing seems realistic by any stretch of the imagination, it is evocative of the theme for the level.  The Suburbs level has a bunch of house and back yards to drive through, and the Junkyard has piles of trash to drive around on as well as cartoonishly large waste disposal plants.  If there is any knocks against the levels to be had, it is that they all look dark and muted – which seems to be the overall aesthetic of the title – and the sense of scale is often inconsistent.  Hammerhead, a huge truck, at times appears to be fifty feet tall, and five feet tale at others when compared to the environments.  The scale amongst the selectable cars seems right at least.
 
To me, this was a single player game.  It has a local multiplayer mode, but it reaffirmed my policy that split screen is lame.  Also, you need to play against other people who have played the game.  Most of my friends had not played it so given my familiarity with the weapons and maps that came with beating a game with every character – which play the same maps every time – to say that I totally smoked everyone would be an accurate statement.  Also, given the limits on how many people can play at once, things seem a little empty.  Apparently an online version came out later, never I played it, but it would probably would have been fun if there was not a ton of lag and if Sony was putting out free online adapters.
 
Overall Twisted Metal Black is a fast paced and fun car combat game.  It is the standard by which all other car combat arena games should be measured.