The co-op vehicle selection screen.
The Co-Op: Twisted Metal doesn’t offer many options for cooperative play. In fact, there’s only one: two local players can rumble through the story mode via split screen. Simply push “start” on a second controller. The first player then chooses “Multiplayer” from the main menu, then “Offline Split: 2 Players,” then “Cooperative Story.” Yup. It’s buried.
Unbeknownst to me, the online co-op had been dropped from the title. I didn’t realize it had been cut until I had a retail copy in my anxious little hands. If only there was a site that focused on co-op gaming...
My wife is a heck of a gamer, but there are three things you should know about her: She hates racing games, she’s not fond of the PS3, and she just had a baby. Oh boy.
I invited her to play a local split screen game. She took the PS3 controller, glowering at me in disgust. She’s a good sport though, and asked me which buttons did what. I proceeded to explain to her the default Twisted Metal controls:
“Okay, bear with me.” I begin, “Push Square to accelerate.”
“What?!”
“Push Circle for your brakes.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Double tap the Circle button to go in reverse...”
“Are you ******* kidding me?”
“...or you can pull back on the right thumbstick. Got it?”
“Just tell me what makes it shoot and let’s get this over with.”
...
That's what she said! I'm not kidding.
Here's the co-op campaign in action.
Things suddenly took a turn for the awesome. Apparently, my wife is some sort of car combat savant. She killed three opponents in our first match, and I was doing my damnedest to cherry-pick her kills. We easily crushed the first third of the story mode in under an hour. Yeah, that’s right, an hour. Twisted Metal’s campaign is lacking in length, and sadly, that’s the only cooperative option. Hey, at least now my wife likes something other than light gun games on the PS3.
During co-op play the screen is split horizontally, and some of the prime viewing real estate has been gobbled up by min-maps and scoreboards. The difficulty doesn’t seem to scale up for cooperative play, either. Players do share a garage, so each person will choose one backup vehicle instead of two. Either player can use the other’s backup if needed. If one player dies you're looking at a restart. This shouldn't be a problem because the story mode is a Sunday drive for two players on the Normal settings. You’ll want to goose the difficulty to Hard or Twisted for a decent challenge. Players can go back and play their favorite story missions once they have been completed.
When we finished a mission the scoreboard displayed our team “Damage Done” and “Damage Received.” No kills were listed. We were disappointed that we couldn’t see which of us individually did the most damage or who got more kills. We were also awarded a bronze, silver, or gold medal, which seems to be based solely on how quickly we won the round. Players who wish to unlock everything will need to earn gold medals in every mission on Twisted difficulty, either in single player or cooperatively.