Twisted Metal: Black

The Good
I really like the stories in Twisted Metal. They're all dark and delightfully twisted. It's a world where good people are punished in ironic fashion (or sometimes just outright screwed over!) and the wicked are rewarded with further opportunity for evil. It's wonderful fun, if you like the gruesome and macabre.

The Bad
Good Lord, everything else, though! The stories may be interesting, but the game itself is awful. (And the stories were cut from the PAL release, which is like scraping the icing off a supermarket sponge cake.) The cars feel floaty; it's more like controlling an RC car than driving an actual car. The destructible environments, most notably in the Suburbs level, are not satisfying; it feels more like knocking over cardboard cutouts (not even that, really) than any serious destruction. The drivers all have too much health, making battles take much longer than is fun; this is a major problem in the story mode, as the AI favours cheap hit-and-run tactics, making it difficult to even land one hit, let alone the twenty or so you'll need to finish them off. The game simply isn't fun.

The graphics are nothing special. The cutscenes are down through still images, and have that icky plastic look characteristic of mediocre CGI. During the game, everything seems small and sparse, and above all brown. It's very visually unappealing. The soundtrack is uninteresting and the sound effects are merely perfunctory.

The Bottom Line
It's basically the Battle Mode in Mario Kart expanded to be a whole game. Sounds awesome, right? Too bad it's badly done. That few other games attempt this is surely why Twisted Metal is thought at all fondly of. Watch the cutscenes on YouTube instead. If you must play the game, make sure to avoid the PAL version; this version is an utter rip-off.