In order to experience the full motion-controlled extravagance of your Freestyle Pro, the Sensor button has to be activated and believe me, this will give you a gaming experience you’ve never even imagined. Once it’s activated, you can tilt the unit to the left or right, forward or backwards in order to duplicate the analog X and Y axis motions of a joystick. The solid-state gravity-based motion detector will provide a totally lag-free accurate response. Disable this option if your game doesn’t adopt well to the Freestyle.

I tried out the Sidewinder Freestyle Pro by playing Need For Speed III with it. The gaming experience was just overwhelming; there was far more control over the vehicle, and careening wildly from side to side has never been so fun with a mere joystick.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Outstanding motion-sensing capability.
• User friendly features 
• Highly customizable
• Throttle wheel

Cons

• Does not suit some games
• A bit tough to find neutral on the throttle, since there’s no centering mark

The main attraction of the Freestyle is its superb motion-sensing capabilities. The solid-state gravity-based motion detector brings much realism into the gameplay, with it’s lag-free responses. 

The ability to turn the motion-sensing mode on or off just by the press of a button comes in handy, too, for those moments when total sensivity to your movements is not what you want from your game controller. The introduction of a new throttle wheel is also a very unique feature when it comes to flight sims, and the highly customizability allows you to fine-tune the Freestyle Pro’s sensitivity along each axis of movement and save customized game profiles so that you don’t have to waste time on reprogramming the unit later.

What you do have to waste time on is finding neutral on the throttle before assigning the rest of your controls. This is a relatively minor complaint, of course, but there’s always something like this to add a teensy bit of imperfection to a product that would otherwise be dangerously near perfection. It’s something of a law of nature.