EDIT: PLEASE READ MY NEWER VERSION OF THIS RETROSPECTIVE. THANK YOU.
Let me open up this post by saying Twisted Metal 3 is not a beloved title to many Twisted Metal fans. I am personally one of those people, but this game has a long history with me. I haven’t touched it in a few years, and after watching a few Youtubers cover it, I wanted to take another look at it.
Twisted Metal Small Brawl was the first Twisted Metal game I ever played, all the way back in 2001 or 2002. After playing it, I was hooked, and I wanted to go buy it. So my mom and I went to the local Toys R Us, and I picked out a new copy of Twisted Metal Small Brawl and Twisted Metal 3.
I played them both religiously, but I found myself definitely having issues with Twisted Metal 3. Even before I knew about the fandom’s consensus on the game, I still came to the same conclusion of the title’s mediocrity. After I picked up the other titles in the series, Twisted Metal 2 stuck out as one of the best. Hell, it was probably one of the best games I had ever played at that point.
I later had found out that Twisted Metal 3 was developed by a different studio after Single Trac left the franchise and dissolved. Single Trac left none of the game assets, so it had to all be rebuilt from the ground up.
Needless to say, the new engine that they used just made the entire game feel off. However, that wasn’t the only glaring issue in TM3’s arsenal. This write-up is focused on talking about a few of those issues that have been beaten to death in the community, but also go over a few things I did enjoy about the game.
I personally think a large part of the physics flaws could have been forgiven if the characters and vehicles matched up better with the tone of Twisted Metal 2. David Jaffe, the original co-creator of Twisted Metal 2, has stated himself that 989 Studios didn’t understand the world of Twisted Metal, and I wholeheartedly agree.
Twisted Metal 1 and 2 took itself seriously with a hint of cynical humor. It had the tone of Spawn, The Mask, or even The Twilight Zone. I know it will sound eye rollingly cliche, but Twisted Metal 3 just tonally didn’t “get it”. The humor was too juvenile with no deeper substance. The character designs and writing directly reflected that. Hammerhead is driven by an old granny just for the sake of being ironically funny. There’s no further substance to it. Almost every character is written with that piss poor level of depth, and it makes all of them unenjoyable to play as.
Not only are the characters bad, but if I’m being honest, most of the vehicles look bland as well. A good design philosophy is to have each character have a unique silhouette. You remember how the Pokemon cartoon would ask you “Who’s that Pokemon?!”, and 9/10 times you could tell who it is? With Twisted Metal 3, half of the vehicle roster would be almost indistinguishable as a silhouette or way too similar. Twisted Metal 2, without any serious bias had a very distinct design, shape, and size for every vehicle in the line-up. I think Roadkill, Spectre, and Outlaw were the only characters that had very similar proportions if you were casually looking at them. Sadly, even the TM3 character’s you can distinguish are still held down by a lack luster design, and a poor in-game camera. Sweet Tooth’s clown head is horrendous, and the 3rd person camera is shoved too close to the vehicle. Primeval and Darkside are non playable boss characters that can be unlocked via Gameshark. Both of their 3rd person cameras are awful.
The saving grace of these vehicles are the steep upgrade in graphics fidelity. Thumper and Spectre both received a wonderful graphical update faithful to their TM2 counterparts. Spectre is a Viper instead of a C3 Corvette, but it really works well. Outlaw also gets a good update, despite me wishing it was a 4 door patrol car.
So the vehicle graphic fidelity looks better, so how about the levels? Well the levels all look okay, I suppose. What hurts me is the lack of set dressing in each level. They feel way too barren. TM1 and TM2, with such piss poor polygonal detail, managed to use awesome sprite work to pump up the fidelity of the levels. Trees, grass, poles, cars, people, objects, etc, all helped bring these levels to life. TM3 levels oddly miss a lot of those details. I think the North Pole and Egypt levels both manage to create a well crafted theme, to their credit.
What I have to really rip into is the level design. My god, are all of the levels just bad. The vehicle physics are bad enough, but combined with these terribly flowing levels, I can hardly play the game for more than a half hour or an hour at a time, it is seriously that poor.
The Hollywood level, for example, is a barren open level, with a few altitude variations ranging from pits to highway ramps leading to a destroyed overpass. There is little to no flow to the layout for any fire-fights. The set dressing is almost non-existent, so it ends up looking like a barren polygonal abstraction akin to an Unreal Tournament arena. While this is a game from 1998, as I said, the previous entries in the series brought the levels to life. I’d also like to point out that many other vehicular combat games of the era, with the same console limitations, pulled off lively and fun levels much better.
This spills over into the weapons in Twisted Metal 3, because the level designs really extrapolate the poor weapon designs. Missiles do not follow the contour of the ground, so 9/10 times, a missile will simply explode into the ground when trying to hone in on an opponent at a lower altitude. All later iterations of Twisted Metal do a great job at having missiles follow the elevation of the ground instead of self destructing into it. TM3 also introduces a lot of arcing weapons on top of the napalm pick-up. For some reason, the projectile arc is constantly too long, and never lines up with the enemy vehicles. TM2 had the napalm throwing down to an art, with just the right amount of homing capabilities to adjust for enemy distance.
I think that about covers a lot of the negative elements I wanted to talk about. The vehicle physics go without question, and you can find multiple reviews and retrospectives talking about the bad handling characteristics of the vehicles. To keep it short, the vehicles have a tendency to flip over easily, get stuck on walls, and fly all over the place when struck by weapons. This just contributed to a lot of frustrated players, and a complete break in the gameplay as you waited for the wonky vehicle physics to correct itself. I believe it used some variation of the physics engine from 989 studio’s racing title, Rally Cross, but I would have to cite that somewhere. The physics may have worked great for a racing title, but they didn’t quite work for this application.
On a positive note, this game has Calypso once again voiced by Mel McMurrin. Mel McMurrin is to Calypso, as Rod Serling is to the Twilight Zone. His voice just lends itself perfectly to the franchise, and even as dreadful as his dialogue is, I can’t help but appreciate the fact that he returned. If Twisted Metal was to ever return, he has to come back to voice Calypso again.
Another positive aspect of the game was the continuation of the “World Tour” theme, in which contestants fight all over the world. Egypt, while not the strongest design for gameplay, has a great theme and style to it. Other interesting additions included Tokyo and London, but their design was pretty dreadful, and the detail made them also feel barren. To put it as constructively as possible, the ideas were there, with poor execution. It wasn’t until Twisted Metal Head-On came out, that we finally were able to see these level themes executed much better.
I also enjoyed the return of Darkside, and I liked the idea of him being a mini boss. I’d also like to add that I like Darkside being driven by Mr.Ash again. I’m not a big fan of Doll Face, and I just think Mr.Ash has a lot more of a campy horror vibe. Even the user manual says in his character bio that “Mr.Ash does not appear on normal film” haha.
The game missed the mark in more ways than I can count, but it had a few redeeming factors, and it at least attempted to be a continuation of Twisted Metal 2. Overall, I still prefer it over Twisted Metal 4 in theme, and even gameplay. This should never be anyone’s first experience with Twisted Metal, as this is not how the other games feel at all in terms of gameplay or theming. Despite everything, this game is a part of my childhood, and fun-fact, it also made an appearance in Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy. It sold millions of units, and allowed this franchise to continue on. Hopefully long enough for me to help contribute to the next entry.
