PS3 Review: Lair

Lair exists, as far as I'm concerned, to establish the bottom of the barrel.

"But, but, but... the graphics are so shiny! And you get to fly dragons!" you say. Well you'd be one of those people sorely disappointed by this game, just as I was. For everything the game got right, it got some basic core gaming element horribly wrong.

You should never buy this game, so let's keep this short and semi-sweet. The controls are a disaster. Right out of the box, you'll only be able to control your dragon with the sixaxis controls. That is, instead of steering your dragon through the skies, you'll need to bump, tilt, jerk, and shake the controller to get it to go where you want. This was an exciting idea three years ago, before everyone figured out sixaxis controls suck, but now that we know sixaxis controls suck, the game is virtually unplayable. That is, until you download the free patch from the PSN which then allows the option for analog control.

This, however, is just putting a band-aid on a broken leg. Once the controls are fixed, the handling remains awful. They give you the option to fly three different dragons, but I couldn't tell any difference between them beyond cosmetics. The levels are big, which I'm sure sounded good on paper, but the dragons don't exactly break the sound-barrier, so a lot of play-time is taken up by huffing and puffing your way from one end of the map to the other. Collision-detection is supremely annoying. The computer won't let you crash, so any time your wingtips brush a canyon wall, your dragon breaks off and begins some crazy evasive action which will completely ruin your flightplan. You're never targeting the enemy you want to target, and the stupid quicktime events ruin what fun there is in launching volleys of fireballs on lines of enemies.

This is all a shame, because the story isn't awful, the graphics are good for their time, and the mission objectives remain surprisingly varied (though the ocassional escort mission bogs things down). I finished ten levels for the three qualities mentioned above, but I couldn't complete the game. I sold it for five dollars on Amazon. And he overpaid.

I hesitate to post the gameplay footage below. No doubt it looks awesome, but I can assure you that whatever that dragon is doing on the screen, the player is not trying to make it do that.

Award-Giving Time: Lair gets the Neville Chamberlain award. No doubt he had good intentions, but he just didn't get the job done, did he?



--Serge

PS: Myah! 2 out of 10