When the first PlayStation was released, I was generally not impressed with the game selection; that is, until I discovered the original Twisted Metal. Being a huge fan of the early Twisted Metals and Twisted Metal Black, I was eager to get my hands on this new iteration and from what I played of the newest Twisted Metal, I can tell that the developer’s collective mindset behind the game was, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”

One of the reasons I loved the Twisted Metal games was because they were so….well, twisted. To this day, I think Twisted Metal Black has the best stories out of any driving game I have ever played. While I was only able to play the multiplayer portion of the game, from the appearance of Sweet Tooth’s deranged clown face in the menu screen, I can tell that this game is still dark and demented in its presentation.

Overall, the game feels extremely familiar. You can still select from a wide variety of vehicles that include: muscle cars, trucks, motorcycles, and even helicopters. While the three aforementioned vehicles are nothing new to the series, helicopters are quite different and even a bit frantic to control. Like everyone else, you still have your standard machine gun fire, you can still pick up special items like rocket launchers, but unlike everyone else, you can ascend into the sky and pick at enemies from afar.

When I asked the developers about the helicopter potentially breaking some of the game’s balancing issues, they did admit that it was hard to test for and is still being heavily tweaked. While the helicopter does have its distinct bird’s eye advantages, the developers did note that the chopper was an easy target in the sky, so they are trying to balance out the helicopter’s life to compensate for that.

Other than that, the game feels very similar to past iterations: your vehicle can only take so much damage, you can still pick up special abilities. The level that I played on was your typical large scale metropolitan city. While Sony did not reveal all the gameplay modes, I did participate in a standard game of team deathmatch. The game also supports four-player split screen and up to eight on eight online.

One new addition this time around is the inclusion of factions. In the demonstration that I participated in, I was placed into the Clown faction. The other opposing team was the Doll faction. Sony told me that more factions would be included and that each faction would have distinct advantages and disadvantages, but they would refuse to disclose further than that.

Visually, the game looks solid, but it doesn’t particularly jump out at you in this day and age. The environments are still appropriately post-apocalyptic looking with brown and grey tones covering the streets and highways. The lightening effects in the sky add a bit of chaos to the setting and there are plenty of things to set on fire.

From playing the multiplayer portion of the game, it looks like Twisted Metal knows what it wants to be: the same old fast, furious, and frantic shooter that you grew up with. If that sounds appealing to you, keep your eye on the title when it ships sometime in Spring of 2011.