Twisted Metal: Black's graphic engine is excellent. Every object in the huge levels appears without any pop up or aliasing issue and everything runs smoothly at 60 FPS. In the four player modes too, the game never gives a sign of slowdown. Incog. Inc. did really a good job here.
The levels are huge, built with thousands of different textures, and the Ps2 seems to wonderfully handle them. The dark colours used for buildings, roads, skies give this a game a gloomy atmosphere worth of a survival horror game like Silent Hill. While you are running through the city roads you can see the menacing shapes of far away skyscrapers gradually showing all their details.
Speaking of the special effects used in the game they are usually marvellous. Rockets, smoke rising from a destroyed car, special light effects like the ones used when a gas tank explodes. The animations used for the cars are great too and you'll be surprised seeing what deadly weapons they hide in their finely defined bodies. Special moves like the one of Sweet Tooth's Ice Cream Truck are so stunning that you'll never have enough of them.
While Twisted Metal: Black's graphics are stunning, they're not completely flawless. First of all, when you hit big objects like, for example, the rose window of a church, the animation of the breaking glasses are far away from looking real. You hit the window and while you can hear a good, powerful crashing sound, you see just a few pieces of glass in the air and the window is completely disappeared. A similar thing happens when a car explodes. You see a wonderful fire explosion but you don't see the pieces of the car going in all directions like it should happen in reality or in a good action movie. Adding to that, after a few seconds, the fire disappears and there is no sign of the car. These limitations in the special effects were probably evident to the developers themselves, but they probably preferred to have a game constantly flowing at 60Fps instead of life-real animations.
