In Eat Sleep Play’s hope revive the franchise, the new Twisted Metal reboot for the Playstation 3 brings old school weapon-based vehicular carnage to the current generation of hardware.

The campaign tells you the main story through the eyes of three of the series classic characters, Sweet Tooth, Doll Face and Mr Grimm. Their origin stories are revamped and are told using live action actors with CG environments in grindhouse like cutscenes.

***This paragraph contains spoilers*** Twisted Metal’s plot surrounds a winner takes all tournament run by a mysterious corporate man named Calypso whose true identity is hinted early on in the game. Winning the fight to the death grants you a wish and all of the protagonists have plenty of motivation to use this chance well, except they don’t. The twist of it all is that the wishes predictably don’t turn out as planned. While at the beginning one can understand how this happens, by the time we’re shown Doll Face’s conclusion the justification for the circumstances seem stupid. At the end a hint is revealed regarding a sequel reminiscent of the original titles in the series and I felt satisfied to a certain degree.

By playing the story missions the player is gradually introduced the different weapons, vehicles, game types and the maps, gradually increasing the difficulty as you progress and can be tackled in split-screen co-op. At your disposal are 17 vehicles and a bunch of weapons and gadgets to go with them. Next to the reloadable specials for each individual vehicle, weapons and health can be picked up on the battlefield as individual items, or from burning victims fleeing their destroyed vehicles. One map has match viewers tossed into the arena for bonus items.

Besides the individual boss fights, the game features different varieties of “kill everybody” modes including a juggernaut mode, where heavily armoured trucks spawn new enemies, a cage match, where players must remain in a specific area and a race mode. Race and Cage matches are not available in online multiplayer though.

Multiplayer on the other hand has a fully customisable in split-screen mode for up to 4 players, which can also be played with bots, and online includes a Hunted mode where players only score whilst taking down a specific target or take out others as the target themselves. Another game type is a variant of one of the boss battles called “Nuke” where players must gain control of guided missiles to take out an enemy target.

Ploughing through the main story will take you 5-7 hours and if you try to get all the medals and fight your way through the higher difficulty settings you’ll be looking at possibly double the time. This is done through the magic retro style gaming, when developers wanted to make a 45 minute game last three hours, they simply made it harder and they did this by using cheap tricks.

At the beginning of the game you have the feeling that you’re taking part in a free for all tournament but after a while you can’t shake the feeling that everyone is after you. This is enforced when later in the game the host announces “these are all gang members out to get you”. Ok, in the end the game comes straight out and says “everyone on the map is only after you, and we’re throwing more enemies at you than before”. The NPCs lose all logic to succeed becoming especially tedious in cage matches when you realise that enemies don’t take damage in the danger zones. Vehicles push you straight into walls, throw you in the opposite direction and at times block the path entirely making the use of ramps (which are sometimes necessary to progress) impossible. In these matches the unbalanced nature of how vehicles behave in speed brings to the forefront why they are not featured in multiplayer. Be prepared to see the death screen regularly, even on the easiest difficulty.

While the cutscenes tell you something otherwise, the game has a wide colour pallet it brings to the table in its highlight of the game, the maps. The different battlegrounds all feature a unique style with vibrant contrasts and details to the layout and destruction which make you smile, even if the game is busting your balls. Undoubtedly the selection of old school hard rock and even hip hop set you in the right mood during every match, with artists like AC/DC and Ice Cube ensuring that almost everybody should recognise a track. The voice acting plays its part right, with the right mix of twisted and downright cheesy, giving action fans the right dose for the explosion heavy journey.

When all is said and done towards the end when memorising patterns and figuring out how to beat a boss Twisted Metal gives you the rewarding sensation one only seems to know from the 90s (although it can’t go unsaid that one of the boss fights uses ways to extend the game’s time with dirty trickery). The destruction, the split screen matches and the over all sensation of awe for the little things the game delivers, bring forth a title to which there isn’t currently anything to compare it with. It’s one of those games you don’t have to go out and buy, but one of your friends better have it, to bring it over during the next game night.