I'm not sure why I've logged into my account after such a long period of absence just to comment on this, but I suppose I've done more heinous things in my time.
Through my own personal Google-fu, I am given to understand that the new TM developers have the following games under their belt so far:
- The Persistence - A passingly interesting but ultimately standard-looking sci-fi horror FPS game with an unfortunate lack of character and identity of its own.
- Air Force Special Ops: Nightfall - A VR "game" that essentially just a tedious recruitment tool for the U.S. Air Force. Its gameplay reads like a Call of Duty reskin of Superman 64.
- The Playroom - From what I can tell, a collection of fun but not very deep minigames involving a bunch of robots who look strangely similar to Eva from Wall-E. There's a VR version.
- Run, Sackboy, Run - An iOS game where you run endlessly until you fail. Think of a much more elaborate version of that T-rex running game you can play when your internet isn't working and your browser pages aren't loading.
- Horizon: Call of the Mountain (not released yet) - A VR game that looks to be more like an interactive movie with some gameplay elements than an actual game with complex mechanics, if the reveal trailer and the past track record of the developer is anything to go by.
...I am entirely unsure why
this was the developer Sony chose to work on a game like Twisted Metal, but their catalogue doesn't fill me with a ton of hope that they'll handle the game properly. It'd be one thing if the devs had either a much broader series of releases under their belt (which would indicate enough
general development experience to pull off doing something like this for the first time) or a back-catalogue of exclusively driving/racing titles of varying quality, but this is by all accounts a group with minimal experience and not much of a pedigree to speak of. Nothing they've done thus far suggests that this is their forte, or that there's even
that much imagination or creative brilliance in the things they do. Sure, all of their games are
technically proficient; the graphics are very shiny, there are no framerate issues, and each one contains minimal bugs and coding errors that I can see. But they also possess rather simple mechanics— which don't always work, if the Air Force game is anything to go by— and they are entirely unremarkable from an artistic standpoint. Call me pessimistic, but I feel like that's the exact opposite of what we need for a new TM game.
Mind you, if they drop the ball with this reboot the way ESP fumbled the last one, that might spell the end for this entire franchise. Sony's faith in TM has clearly not been high over the course of the last decade, so if this reboot doesn't pan out, they might decide to just vault the entire IP.
...
On the other hand, if this TM reboot turns out to be smash hit, then it'll accomplish the unexpected trifecta of successfully reviving a long-dead franchise, helping Sony combat their shortage of new exclusives that people actually care about, and solidifying Firesprite as a contender in the triple-A development market. So I'll reserve
most of my judgment until we have some actual gameplay footage for the thing, since the reward is about as high as the risk.