Quick Look: Twisted Metal Demo (with Gameplay Video)

Twisted Metal is the latest game in the prestigious combat racing series, this time arriving from Eat, Sleep, Play, with famous designer David Jaffe masterminding the whole experience.

As opposed to the more recent games in the series, the new title takes a gritty and violent approach to gameplay, allowing gamers to use a variety of weapons to take down their opponents in spectacular manners.

Now, in order to show off this new experience, Sony has deployed a special demo for Twisted Metal on the PlayStation Store, giving players access to both a single-player match and two multiplayer modes, in the form of Team Deathmatch and Nuke.

We decided to try out this demo and see if the new Twisted Metal game has a place between current video game franchises on the PlayStation 3 or if it’s better to just scrap the title.

Twisted Metal delivers a fun experience but it seems quite imposing once you start the actual tutorial, which goes over every gun, ability or power your car has, tasking you with performing every action three times. While that isn’t very hard, there are some cases, like the annoying Turbo Dash which requires you to flick the controller forward but barely records that actual movement.

While the tutorial does a decent job of outlining the variety of controls, nothing can really prepare you for an actual Twisted Metal match, as even if the maps are quite large and varied, enemies will soon converge on your location and shoot you with everything they have.

I didn’t play any other Twisted Metal game before and, as you can see in the video above, I barely managed to rack up one kill, even if I was trying my hard to actually hunt down my enemies. In terms of car controls, it’s as arcade as possible, with vehicles stopping almost immediately and pulling off tight corners without any sort of problem.

Action in the single-player challenge included in the demo was pretty intense but, unfortunately, errors in matchmaking and connectivity still plague the demo, at least for now, so I couldn’t try out any of the multiplayer modes against real life humans.

Hopefully, things will be solved before February 14 (North America) or February 17 (Europe), when the actual game is released on the PS3.