Indulge Your Sweet Tooth
Fans have been clamoring for Sweet Tooth’s inevitable return, and they’re about to get what they’ve been asking for; Twisted Metal is coming back in a big, bad way This entry will be in a similar style to 2001’s Twisted Metal: Black, once again shedding the cartoony aesthetic of the original games and replacing it with the dark and gritty visuals that made Black such a hit a decade ago. Let’s dig into what else this game has to offer.
Like the rest of the Twisted Metal series, this is all about the frantic battle for survival. You’re going to have to fight and claw your way to the top in arenas that can support up to 16 players. Thankfully, there’s also a four-player split-screen option—a feature that’s missing from too many games these days—so you can grab a few friends and play locally.
A brand new addition is Nuke Mode, where you choose a side and protect your statue from the enemy team while also trying to destroy their statue. You can’t just drive up to the statue and start unloading bullets or unleashing volleys of missiles at it, instead you have to abduct the enemy team’s leader and sacrifice them in order to launch a missile at the enemy’s statue. Do this three times and your team will come out victorious.
There are four factions to choose from: the Dolls, the Skulls, the Clowns, and the Preachers. Obviously, the Clowns share a remarkable resemblance to Sweet Tooth, the psychotic clown we all know and love, and the Dolls are similar to Black’s Dollface. Fans of the series can probably deduce that the Preachers and Skulls will have something to do with The Preacher and Mr. Grimm, respectively.
Like any good sequel, there’s going to be a pretty decent selection of new vehicles and weapons to choose from. Some of the new additions include a motorcycle called the Reaper and a hearse called the Shadow, along with an extermenator van, a meat wagon, a Talon helicopter, two semi trucks, and much more. And if you’re dying to jump back into the familiar seat of your favorite vehicles from past games in the series, you’ll have the Junkyard Dog, Crimson Fury, and Sweet Tooth’s insanely creepy ice cream truck to choose from, among others. A welcome addition here is the ability to choose both your driver and the vehicle you’ll be using instead of choosing a vehicle and getting whichever driver comes with it.
How you perform is going to be important because it will affect the XP you receive that in turn influences your global ranking against other Twisted Metal players. The XP system will also be a source for rewards—as you accumulate XP you’ll unlock new features, though little details regarding these rewards have been unveiled so far.
Twisted Metal has managed to retain much of what made it so popular in the ’90s with its old school controls—you can choose the classic format where the gas is mapped to the X button, or you can go with the more modern trigger layout—and arcadey vehicular combat, but it’s nice to see Eat Sleep Play introducing a few new features to the mix as well. Multiplayer offerings have come a long way in the last ten years, and it looks like Twisted Metal is more than capable of evolving with the times.
Teamwork is also being pushed a little harder this time with new “Crew Attacks” that have you joining a teammate inside their vehicle. One example is the Talon helicopter that can use its magnet ability to grab other vehicles to form a massive tower of vehicular death. Another is the Juggernaut semi truck, where a second player can actually drive into the back of the semi to use the turret emplacement on the truck’s roof. These special abilities will definitely add some strategy to the mix, making the game less about who has the quicker trigger finger and more about who can work well with their team.
Twisted Metal has been a long time in the making, and I’m sure fans of the series are foaming at the mouth to have the chance to cause all sorts of mayhem with or against their friends. This game isn’t likely to disappoint, especially with such an intriguing and welcome arsenal of additions and tweaks to the classic Twisted Metal formula. This game sounds like it’s going to be a must-have when it releases in February.
Game Features:
Burning Rubber And Nuking The World
Twisted Metal is one of those relics of the 90s that everyone remembers fondly, even though it probably wouldn’t hold up to today’s standards. Sure, a multiplayer four-man vehicle-based battlefest was fine for local games, but today we routinely play online games of sixteen or even thirty-two members per side, which would dwarf the paltry four-player battles from Twisted Metal’s past. Since Twisted Metal has always been about the multiplayer, the game needed to be overhauled for its upcoming 2012 release—and what an overhaul it is! David Jaffe and the rest of the team over at Eat Sleep Play have turned this once dead franchise into a multiplayer experience that might be able to rival some of the big-name shooters on the market right now.
Twisted Metal is one of those relics of the 90s that everyone remembers fondly, even though it probably wouldn’t hold up to today’s standards. Sure, a multiplayer four-man vehicle-based battlefest was fine for local games, but today we routinely play online games of sixteen or even thirty-two members per side, which would dwarf the paltry four-player battles from Twisted Metal’s past. Since Twisted Metal has always been about the multiplayer, the game needed to be overhauled for its upcoming 2012 release—and what an overhaul it is! David Jaffe and the rest of the team over at Eat Sleep Play have turned this once dead franchise into a multiplayer experience that might be able to rival some of the big-name shooters on the market right now.
And speaking of heavy vehicles, a huge eighteen-wheeler has been revealed. The truck can take a lot of punishment, but it isn’t the best at dishing it out. What it can do, however, is heal other vehicles on the field. All they do is drive up into it from behind. (That’s some awesome Knight Rider stunting right there.) Not only will their vehicle be shielded by the tractor trailer’s beefy exterior, but the driver will climb up to the top of the truck to control a mounted turret, giving it extra firepower.
In addition, vehicles won’t be stuck on the ground in the new Twisted Metal. Players will be able to hop in to a new helicopter, which sacrifices hit points and fire-power for a maximum amount of mobility. The helicopter will even have a towing magnet that will allow you to pick up another car, weapons intact, and fly it around the map to rain carnage upon everyone below.
Teamwork seems to be the name of the game this time around. Trucks will have an easy time going toe to toe with a car, but a swarm of bikes will shred it to pieces. Meanwhile, bikes might have a hard time bringing down a helicopter, but a tank or any vehicle with a homing weapon can shoot it out of the air while someone else distracts it.
Teamwork will also be key in many of the new game modes. While classic game types like Deathmatch will be returning, the development team is adding a few new modes that put a Twisted Metal spin online multiplayer. Nuke Mode is one such mode, where you have to capture an enemy leader from inside the enemy’s base, drive him back to a nuclear missile silo, then stay around the base long enough so that your army of peons can strap the enemy leader to a nuclear missile and launch it at a towering statue that looms over your opponent’s headquarters. It’s one part capture the flag, one part king of the hill.
When you first start up this new Twisted Metal, you will have a limited amount of cars, weapons, and factions to choose from. However, as you win battles online, you gain XP and level up, unlocking more stuff. Apparently the new Twisted Metal is taking a page from Call of Duty, allowing you to get progressively better weapons and rewards the more you play online. The development team hasn’t yet revealed details on what these weapons and reward are, nor have they even confirmed that the game will be using loadouts or anything similar, but the presence of XP has been confirmed by Jaffe himself.
There are several other features that have been leaked over the past few months. For example, the game will feature multiple control schemes, one of which will mirror the exact control layout of the original Twisted Metal games. Online leaderboards have also been confirmed, as has a full story mode and single-player suite. There are still a few bugs; numerous outlets have reported frame rate drops, game crashes, and broken menus, but Jaffe has continued to assure us that this will all be fixed by the game’s launch. We still have half a year to go before the game finally comes out, so we can certainly look forward to more big announcements.
Cheat Code Central will continue to keep you updated on every Twisted Metal story that breaks. Either way, this game will certainly deliver a whole lot more than four-player local multiplayer.
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