The most mid-90s of video games.
Twisted Metal was one of the first PlayStation games I owned when I was a kid. Released November 5th, 1995, when Christmas rolled around and my dad bought me a Playstation (he wanted the Playstation just as much as I did. I was just his excuse to get one), this was one of 2 games we got for it. As an 8-year-old, this game was the most interesting game I had seen up to that point. You drive a car and drive around shooting other cars with missiles? That seemed pretty cool at the time. Unfortunately, time did not treat Twisted Metal well.
When you start, you have to pick a car you'd like to play as. All 12 characters play fairly unique and have different strengths and weaknesses; The ghost man's car, Spectre, shoots a fire missile that goes through walls and meanders until it finds someone to do damage to as long as there's someone in that general direction. Or you could drive as Hammerhead: The monster truck driven by 2 delinquent teenagers where you just run other cars over. My favorite of the bunch is Roadkill. His car is the most Mad Maxx of the bunch where he shoots a slightly homing metal spear and it does decent damage.
After you decide who your misfit of choice is going to be, you're sent to a one on one arena stage against one of the other 11 combatants in the game to fight to the death. This stage is largely designed to help you get used to the controls and show off your special as you start facing your opponent on the other side of the arena, giving you time to drive up and wrought death with your special attack as that will be the method of destruction in this map. Not too many other pickups other than mines to be had. From there, each map gives you progressively more cars to fight, up to the second to last stage Cyburbia, where you have to fight up to 8 opponents. The last map takes place on rooftops and you have to fight 3 opponents at first then the final boss Minion, a tank that shoots a combination of 3 other car's specials and takes a ton of damage, all while trying to avoid falling off the roof to instant death below and you have to do all of this with only 3 lives with no way to get more. It does have a level password system, though, so if you end up losing all of your lives, you can just type in the password given and continue where you left off.
The problem though is it's really them against you. They rarely fight each other and will more often than not just team up on you, totally ignoring all other cars in their vicinity. That makes the game harder as you only have so much health and the various healing stations that are scattered around the level only heal a set amount. They can heal most of your health if you're someone like Crimson Fury or Spectre who don't have much health or about 1/3 if you're Darkside. Those stations do recharge, but they take a very long time so you'll find yourself just driving around in circles just waiting for them to be ready, all the while orange jumpsuit dudes are shooting machine guns or rockets at you chipping away at your health all the while. This game can be quite frustrating and the limited lives make it even more so.
The graphics are fairly mediocre. Nothing too interesting pops out about them. Not a lot of detail in anything so you run into the issue where parts of the map feel samey and uninspired. They're not good, but they're not bad either. As you get farther into the game, you will notice a dip in the framerate. The more cars you have to fight, the fewer frames the game renders. Cyburbia is the worst offender when it comes to this as fighting 8 opponents has the game chugging at about 15 fps and makes the game feel more sluggish than usual and it will occasionally eat inputs which is always fun.
When it comes to music, you have 3 good songs and the rest are more ambiance than anything. The title song, the song during the freeway level, and the final level music are the best songs in the game. The rest are there to just make sure you're not playing in absolute silence, which I appreciate. The sound effects are serviceable explosions and missile launching sounds. Every special attack in the game has a sound of their own and you'll know immediately who it is when you hear it. The best of which is Sweet Tooth's laugh and Yellow Jacket's "Yeah".
All of this sounds negative, but I still ended up having a fun time with the game. I played it a lot as a kid and the game does what it set out to do: Be a car combat game. It may not look or sound the greatest, the framerate drops can be unfortunate and the limited lives are kind of annoying, but the characters you play as are interesting and the combat is still fun. That's why this game is a 3 out of 5. It's the best kind of mediocre: the fun kind.