Twisted Metal(1995) Review

Not a bad game and can be enjoyable but I can't help but find it to be rough around the edges in a lot of aspects. The handling of the vehicles is decent enough and there is a good feedback to the action. My big issue with the game overall is the difficulty in that it's easy to for you to get to low health while trying to widdle down the health of one or two cars and your only means of recovering health is using healing pads which have a limited use even with save states and rewind, the game was starting to become tedious to play with the amount of times I would rewind to lower the amount of damage I was taking and trying my hardest to finally lower the health of the other cars so I can eliminate them.

Fighting one or three cars is fine but anything beyond three is where the tedium sets in since it's basically a battle of hit and run tactics and hoping your pickups and specials land so you can lower the enemy's health fast enough and also hope you take as little damage as possible and minimize the use of the healing pads as much as you can. I really did wish there was more ways to recover health outside of the healing pads in the game since that could've helped make the battles less of monotonous hit and run and spamming pick ups and specials and pleading that you land direct hits while not taking much damage yourself. On top of this while the vehicle handling works and aiming works well for one or three opponents trying to be precise with driving and using your pick ups and specials while hitting enemies and making sure to make quick getaways to avoid damage was very cumbersome. Black is also designed this way when not using cheats but the vehicle handling and the more forgiving aiming made that game feel beatable by comparison.

I eventually gave up and started to use cheats since the cars had so much health, healing yourself is incredibly limited and the game seems to require you to fail multiple times just to finally beat the levels and I just didn't have the patience for that. The endings for the character is a big reason why I never played with more of the characters outside of Sweetooth since all the endings are basically text crawls making it even harder to get invested in me getting more of the endings since all them are designed in the exact same way and I would rather just Youtube search them.

Not a bad game and there is some fun to be had, but I can see why I was never really into this game when I first played, and I only played because I got it for free from downloading the PS3 version of the game years ago. There is a solid foundation here, but later games improved on the formula big time.