While this is one of my two most hated Twisted Metal games, it does deserve some credit. Basically, this game tried to reinvent the series after seven entries of the same-old, same-old. Sadly, the reinvention is based on online gameplay. The Story Mode only has three playable characters, but they make up for that by allowing the drivers to drive any car, which is a good change. And they use live-action/CGI for the cutscenes to tell the tale of those three, and yes, they are gruesome. In fact, they are the reason why this title is rated Mature when the developers were aiming for a Teen rating.
Sadly, while the cutscenes and the ability to have Sweet Tooth drive anything other than his iconic ice cream truck is good, everything else is bad. Once again, this game changes the controls, but unlike Twisted Metal 4, whose control changes were at least tolerable, Twisted Metal PS3 decides to basically throw the classic controls out the window and make it where Square accelerates and either pressing circle twice or using the right stick makes you go in reverse. I had a lot of trouble playing the game due to forgetting where accelerate is. Also, the D-Pad is restricted to using your energy attacks, which while I can understand why they did it, I wish they didn't make controlling your vehicle so hard.
Also, the story events do add some variety other than the destroy the competition to move on that past games have been known for. There's new variations like Electric Cage, which is basically stay in the cage to avoid losing grace, eventually losing health, and race matches, which are okay, but the checkpoint race in Dollface's story is a pain to beat even in the lowest difficulty.
Twisted Metal PS3 is more focused on online modes, and allows players to fight it out in modes like Team Deathmatch, and even Nuke Mode, which is basically Capture The Flag, only the team on offense captures opposing faction leaders to sacrifice to launchers that will fire missiles that need to be guided to a statue of the opposing faction, who will try and stop the attackers from completing their goal. Sadly, even that gets stale real quick, as it's hard to find a match with a lot of players, and the lack of DLC adding new vehicles and levels to play in also hurts the experience.
While Twisted Metal PS3 does an okay job in reinventing the series, the final results shows it needs some more work. If they ever do a sequel for the PS4, they should get rid of the races, fix the controls to be more like the original games or at the very least, less frustrating, add more than three characters to play as for Story Mode, and add DLC vehicles and levels if they plan to have online modes.
