Last year, Gavin pissed Twisted Metal creator David Jaffe off by saying Jaffe’d implied people at Sony didn’t like his game of vehicular destruction. With David Jaffe leaving the company he’d helped create, Eat.Sleep.Play, just days before Twisted Metal’s release, Gavin was convinced that PlayStation 3 exclusive Twisted Metal would end up being a superbly bad game.

It looks like he was pretty wrong.

The game’s been released in the US – and with that come a barrage of reviews. They’re mostly positive, with a few mixed reactions thrown in, but the general consensus is clear: Twisted Metal is not a terrible game at all. Most complaints seem to be levelled at the forced, and decidedly mediocre single player campaign. Twisted Metal has never been about playing alone though – and its multiplayer shines as some throwaway fun.

“Twisted Metal provides plenty of homicidal — if rather disposable — entertainment. A number of modes and forced campaign levels that simply don’t work, however, set the experience back, and I think that the game could have been truly superb had less effort gone into the failed aspects and more been poured into the type of Twisted Metal that fans know and love,” said Destructoid’s Jim Sterling.

Gameinformer’s Dan Ryckert agrees. “When Twisted Metal embraces the series traditions,” he says,  “it delivers the best action ever seen in the franchise. When it departs from convention, however, it becomes a hit or miss affair. Whether or not vehicular combat can strike a chord with gamers in 2012 the way it did in 1995 remains to be seen, but Twisted Metal is a blast when it’s firing on all cylinders.”

Here are the scores so far: