The big “surprise” announcement at Sony’s press conference this afternoon was that, contrary to what David Jaffe had posted on Twitter a few months back, he is, in fact, working on a Twisted Metal game. As Sweet Tooth drove his ice cream truck out onto the stage, Jaffe and Sony showed off a bunch of gameplay from the upcoming PlayStation 3-exclusive Twisted Metal.
The trailer starts off with some basic gameplay footage, highlighting a variety of vehicles and showcasing a helicopter, the first air vehicle the Twisted Metal series has ever seen. Most of the video, however, is dedicated to showing off a game mode called Nuke, which is hilariously and ridiculously complicated.
You play as either a member of the Sweet Tooth gang, led by Sweet Tooth, or the Dolls, led by Doll Face. Each team has a giant statue of their respective leader, and your goal is to blow up the opposing side’s statue. You don’t use regular weapons to do it, though. Instead, you drive around until you find the other side’s leader. They’re heavily guarded, and are using a mounted machine gun to boot. If you’re able to drive over them, you “capture” them, except by “capture” I mean “tie to your car and drag them behind you as you drive back to your base.”
At your base is a capture zone. Keep the opposing team’s leader in your capture zone long enough, and you sacrifice him to a big rocket launcher you have set up. It’s like a normal rocket launcher, except it also spews fire and has a bunch of gears and spikes in it to grind your sacrifice up. Successfully sacrifice the other team’s leader, and a missile fires. You then have to guard the missile and make sure your opponents don’t blow it up in midair. If you manage to do all this, the missile hits the statue.
You have to do that three times to win the round.
Describing it doesn’t really do it justice, so just go ahead and watch the trailer. I have no idea how long these matches are expected to last, but I could see Nuke mode lasting for quite a while. I’m not disparaging it, though — it looks like a ton of fun. I haven’t played a Twisted Metal game since the very first one on the original PlayStation, but there’s a good chance I’ll be picking this one up.
What do you think? Check out the gallery for the first five screenshots of the game.
