Last month when Play investigated whether or not there was a future for Sixaxis motion control we didn’t come to any particularly optimistic conclusions. But now, having spent a morning with Toy Home, we think we were being too kind. If this and Lair are the best Sony can do to showcase the Sixaxis technology then it would probably be best to just bury the whole idea now, before any more clumsy, unresponsive, cack-handed insults to our perfectly capable thumbs get loose. We’re already getting horrible visions of what Toy Home would be like if it contained planes… it categorically cannot be allowed to happen.

You know how people always joke about how motion control is great for those people that tip the controller to one side as if that’s going to make their character or car or plane go in that direction any faster? Well, let’s be honest for a moment. People who do that are cretins. Don’t try and stick up for them, they just are. And so it follows that any control system that caters to their needs is cretinous. Right? Toy Home just goes to show what a watertight conclusion that is.

This game is a cross between FlatOut, Micro Machines and Destruction Derby, but without anything you can really call racing. It’s all about racking up a high score by doing stunts, smashing into things and hitting checkpoints, which sounds like a reasonable way to spend a few quid, right? Well, it would be if it forced you to steer using Sixaxis. There’s just no benefit to this whatsoever. It’s neither more intuitive nor more precise, nor more like driving a real car than using an analogue stick, but it is a bit like playing a regular driving game while really, really drunk. Going in a straight line is impossible, and you end up swerving this way and that trying to second-guess and compensate for the controller’s complete lack of any useful response.

With Lair it almost made sense that a dragon would be a little unwieldy to control, but this is just supposed to be a toy car – it shouldn’t be this bloody hard. Not that the game as a whole is difficult. In fact, it’s mostly pretty easy, which is presumably supposed to be some compensation for the fact that you can never make the car do exactly what you want it to. But it’s not. It’s no compensation at all.

Gavin Mackenzie