Twisted Metal Black Review

Despite me playing with cheats and I have managed to beat this game without them, I still really enjoy this game to this day. While it is really challenging and I get the appeal after all I get the idea of memorizing a stage layout, remembering every health recharge station, pick ups, and being careful when to attack and to avoid enemies, but at the same time, I just want to shoot and drive and do some serious vehicular carnage and cheats provide that.

And how is the vehicular carnage? It's the best it's ever been, no TM game or even car combat game really comes close to capturing the atmosphere and game feel that this game does. Shooting and blowing up other vehicles has never felt as good as it does here. The feedback you get is unmatched. What also put this game above the rest is how the story is handled, for a car combat game, the individual character stories are pretty engaging and the characters showing their thoughts during load times gives the player something to do and gives the battles more context without getting in the way of the gameplay. There is just enough story here for each main character to keep the player engaged with different kinds of plots from revenge, amnesia thrillers and redemption to name a few. The stories for all the characters do a good job at building intrigue and paying it off with the mid movies and endings.

Overall, this is the ultimate pick up and play game on the PS2 easily and is the best car combat and Twisted Metal game ever made. My only issues are that playing the same stages 10 times with mostly similar maps can start wear thin after a while and some characters like Shadow are not very enjoyable to play as, that and the levels with endless pits can get annoying and the final boss can be a pain in the ass with characters whose Specials don't home in on the enemy since you are fighting a helicoptor at an elevated position where the rest of the enemies in the game are at ground level. Still, must play and I surprisingly enjoyed playing the game 10 times, and I don't do that often.