When we first tried it out at E3, our reaction to Warhawk quickly went from awe to disappointment. Controlling a retro-futuristic jet fighter by tilting the controller was pretty cool, but Warhawk 's producers had promised us a free-form, go-anywhere battlefield, and instead delivered a slow-paced flight simulator.

They finally came through during the Tokyo Game Show, offering up a 10-minute, five-on-five sneak preview of Warhawk's multiplayer team deathmatches, and we couldn't resist taking it for a spin. The battle took place on a mountainous island, with big bases crammed full of vehicles at either end. We started out on foot and were apparently assigned to the bad-guy team, which meant we got to wear bitchin' samurai armor instead of standard olive-drab fatigues.

Naturally, everyone else beat us to the planes and started awkwardly wobbling around in the air, so we decided to see what our infantryman could do on his own. On foot, the controls are standard shooter stuff - no tilt-action required. Weapons were littered all over the place, and switching between them was as easy as hitting a direction on the d-pad, so we started out taking potshots at jets with an assault rifle.

The planes were harder than hell to actually hit, but just firing the gun packed one hell of a visceral punch even without any rumble in the controller. That was mostly thanks to the sound, which came in loud and sharp over the (probably high-end) headphones Sony had provided. As for actually destroying planes, we had better luck once we picked up a rocket launcher, which locked onto the jets and fired homing missiles that knocked them right the hell out of the sky.