Twisted Metal

The Road Boat has a giant magnet on the front which you can suck your rivals on to, charge up and then use to toss them away. Or you can ram them into a wall with a thrust of the Sixaxis. You can reverse it - every special has a secondary fire mode - and it becomes a ricochet projectile weapon. The helicopter has a devastating Gatling gun.

The Vermin, a pest control van, fires player-controllable "rat rockets". The Tow Truck can spawn taxi cabs behind it and then lob them around like a catapult; it can also drop health. The deadly but vulnerable motorcycle comes with a chainsaw you can drag along the ground to heat it up until it catches fire for triple damage. Best of all has to be the ambulance, which fires a patient in a rocket-propelled gurney which can be guided home by the player for extra damage.

It's gloriously crass and silly humour that doesn't take its twistedness too seriously - very much in the spirit of the first game rather than the self-consciously dark Twisted Metal Black. Jaffe says his Eat Sleep Play team is aiming for a T for Teen rating. "The way I've been thinking about it is kind of like eight or nine o'clock television, an edgy Twilight Zone vibe, not as light and frothy as Twisted Metal 2."

No serial killer characters, then? "There are some. There's the eight o'clock CBS serial killer, and there's the HBO serial killer. We're doing the CBS one." It was not always thus: "The original version of this game really was much more urban and Midnight Club, none of the crazy characters were there. As we went through production we got our twisted vibe back."

Twisted Metal will support two-to-four players in split-screen on one console, and 16 online. There will be some form of progression in multiplayer, but in Jaffe's words, "It ain't Call of Duty." He feels the famous Modern Warfare upgrade path is too damaging to balance. "We look at Street Fighter IV as a better inspiration," he says.

Jaffe also wants the game generally to have a slower pace than most online deathmatchers, where death comes swiftly and without warning. "I love the promise of online gaming, but I don't like a lot of online games because the pacing is so quick," he says. "I need to feel more relationship with the people I'm playing against." Consequently the cars have fairly heavy armour and, conveniently, don't have heads to shot.

Back to the show floor. Hands-on in a deathmatch on a more modest suburban map, it's easy enough to see what Jaffe means; combat is flowing rather than staccato, deaths and kills come sparingly and it takes a few solid hits with a rocket to take most of the vehicles down.

All vehicles can fire machineguns and rockets, and there's generous aiming assistance; your main job is to control the car and keep your prey roughly front and centre, but the game will usually reward you with extra damage for doing things the hard, manual way.

It's still a bit of a handful, however. With rockets, guns, special and alternate special, rear-facing weapons, shield and mine on the d-pad, boosting by double-tapping the throttle and a jump (yes, jump) button to worry about - plus a rather old-fashioned default control scheme with accelerate and brake on face buttons - Twisted Metal will twist your fingers at first. At least it doesn't have actual combos any more.

As compensation, the handling is extremely responsive, agile and accommodating. Road Boat turns out to be something of a misnomer, as the heavy old armour-plated car can turn 90 degrees almost on a dime with a tap of the brake. This is done without sacrificing the feel and personality of the vehicles, and it's essential for the frenetic competitive gameplay, as well as negotiating some of the game's tight interior spaces.