E3 2011 Eyes-On: Twisted Metal Single Player - Preview
by Karl Koebke , posted on 11 June 2011 / 3,793 Views
Twisted Metal may be best known for its fast and fun multiplayer but that doesn’t mean that people should overlook the single player. I got a chance to sit down and watch a scene from the single player that starred the doll face robot from a recently released trailer which was more than meets the eye (haha….Transformers joke).
The stage was called Dead Man’s Crossing and I was told it was the second boss fight in the game and took place in Grim’s campaign. A cliff-side road was the setting for the fight just as was shown in the trailer which made for some death defying jumps and intense driving along a deadly drop. Nooks and crannies in the cliff side provide extra health and weapons so make sure you don’t forget to take in some of the sights.
At first the doll face robot just flew around menacingly while her minions in more standard vehicles took you out. You can’t attack the robot directly due to her armor (or you can but it would be like tossing a toothpick at a brick wall) so you need to go a bit indirect about it. Like in the multiplayer nuke mode there was a missile launcher ready and waiting and all you needed to do was feed it a faction leader Tamagotchi style. After dragging the less than enthusiastic doll face behind your car and waiting by the missile Tamagotchi you throw her into the meat grinder and it poops out your much appreciated gift.
Now you take direct control of the missile but you can’t just steer it into the robot’s face without thought because she will do her best to fire it out of the air. Smashing the doll face in the eye with several thousand pounds of explosive force (an estimation I have no intention of fact checking for how realistic it is) isn’t quite enough though so you move into a second phase where your missile defecating pet is mobile and you have to try and keep pace with it while you drag the faction leader behind you. I was told that this is a setting in multiplayer as well so you can set the missile launchers in nuke mode to be mobile and more difficult if that’s your thing.
Two missiles is apparently just too much for doll face robot’s armor, but she still wasn’t going to make it easy. Now you can start to attack her directly, but she also breaks her own oath of antiviolence and starts to attack you directly as well. Floating doll heads provided her protection from guided missiles as well as a method of attacking you when she got bored of batting away your pathetic attempts at an offensive. Whittle her down enough and she puts out three red rings that act like an MMA arena (if in MMA matches you blew up into chunks if you left the ring). Keep attacking her and she’ll eventually move around with the red rings so you have to keep pace with her if you don’t want to die a horrible fiery death.
Finally if you haven’t died yet she will crash into a nearby suspension bridge and you can attack her face directly as she grips onto the damaged bridge. There’s even one more surprise after that, but I’ll leave that little spoiler to some writer who doesn’t care as much about you as I do. I really do care.
This entire demo was played with the Sweet Tooth truck, but I don’t know if this is something chosen by the player or necessitated by the campaign. The Sony representative who played the game for me showed off a bit of robotic action but most of the fight was done with the truck in normal vehicle mode so I don’t think the Sweet Tooth Truck is necessary. Although why you would pick a vehicle that couldn’t turn into a crazy robot that flies and shoots flaming clown heads is beyond me.
Crazy set pieces and mechanics burrowed from multiplayer used in new and cool ways is just the thing for a game like Twisted Metal in my opinion. I really hope that the rest of the single player campaign is as interesting and intense as what I saw, and I’ll have just one more reason to buy the game when it comes out in October.
