Lair

Sep 6, 2007

On paper, Lair sounds like a brilliant and faultless stroke of genius, but somehow developer Factor 5 has managed to eviscerate the amazing concept of mounted all-out dragon warfare, stripping it of whatever potential fun it may have had. This happened in a variety of ways, but we want to focus on two that are not as subjective as the art direction or the crappy and all-too-frequent voiceovers, and those are the lousy motion controls and broken game design.

Drunken Dragon Driving

First off, Lair locks you into using the questionably quirky PS3 motion controls for no apparent reason -- it's not like the analog sticks are used for anything besides simple camera controls which are completely useless because your dragon can't really turn his head to shoot at things to the side of you anyway. This wouldn't be a horrible, fun-crippling flaw if they actually worked, but unfortunately there are a few key maneuvers that are nearly impossible to pull off with any degree of consistency.

Chief among these jerky motion controls is the swift upward motion required to turn your dragon around. When done properly, your dragon will execute an Immelman turn (a barrel roll while performing a vertical half loop) and turn around 180 degrees. You will likely only see this move once or twice though, because the motion-sensing controls simply can't discern between the motion of jerking the Sixaxis upwards and thrusting it forwards (the motion to get your dragon to surge forward very quickly). The result is that every time you want to try to turn around, you run the very likely risk that you will instead accelerate forward extremely rapidly, which is probably the exact opposite of what you wanted to do in the first place.

This example is kind of a metaphor for everything Lair does: whatever you want from this game, it will proudly and haughtily give you the opposite. It's almost as if the game has some kind of deep-seated hatred for gamers and its opportunity to wreak unholy vengeance on all of us has finally arrived. And it gets worse, because the motion-sensing controls of Lair are incapable of registering tilt on more than one axis. That means that whenever you want to turn, you can forget about ascending or descending. Severely limiting your ability to actually play this game, the lack of control is a serious deficit to any kind of enjoyment you may seek.

Not Poor, But Broke

The vendetta against gamers is also carried out in Lair's tragic design which seems as though it was crafted in crazy land. You are constantly bombarded by seemingly nonsensical mini-cutscenes that interrupt gameplay (while not actually pausing the game, mind you, because you continue to get harassed by enemies while these little things play) in order to point out your imperfections like a rude and overbearing family member. Who thought that it was a good idea to cut to a scene of one of the Mantas (pudgy flying manta rays used for ferrying bombs around) that you are charged with protecting as it explodes in midair instead of just having it explode in midair? It's not a good idea at all, in fact, it's annoying and infuriating... but you should get used to it, because you're playing Lair.

This mini-cutscene obsession is carried to insane extents as there are also opportunities for you to enter a little interactive video battle sequence when your dragon gets right in the face of another dragon. You have a few options ranging from clawing, biting or breathing fire into the enemy dragon's midsection, but entering into this aerial melee is so jarring that these fights rapidly devolve into a confused morass of button-mashing and hoping against hope that you win. Rather than add a layer of complexity, these interactive sequence muddle the action and are more of an interruption, just like the mini-cutscenes.

To make matters worse, these battle sequences frequently include upsetting geometry collisions with the camera where it passes through supposedly solid objects revealing their 3D-modeled underpinnings. This immediately breaks any illusions you may have had that you were actually riding a dragon and rudely reminds you that you are playing a poorly-crafted videogame.

Freeze Frame Hottie

While Lair's graphics (referenced by some as one of the game's better features) are indeed high-resolution, the beautiful screenshots are not wholly representative of what the game actually looks like during play. There is a staggering amount of stutter in the framerate, so while the game looks fantastic when idling, actually engaging in the pitched dragon battles we'd been promised causes the game performance to take a nosedive. Seriously crowded combat can result in an upsetting strobe effect that should never occur on a console.

Up close, the water is a magnificent achievement with several layers of undulating waves and gorgeously reflected light. Unfortunately, you don't spend a ton of time flying close to the water and when you are far away from it, the texture repetition produces an unsightly tiling effect. In fact, most of the textures in Lair seem to be repeated too frequently, causing many surfaces in the game to appear as though they are actually gaudy linoleum flooring instead of the farmland that they are supposed to resemble.

There are also a few elements which seem as though they were simply tossed into the game with no regard for their placement. A perfect example of this is the swarm of insects that plague your dragon rider during a level entitled Out of the Ashes. These insects are essentially just thrown at the screen, with no consideration as to the fact that insects generally fly upright and not at random angles. The result is a mess of bugs that come at you flying upside-down and sideways, making them look unrealistic and hint at the generally sloppy workmanship in Lair.

In addition, some levels simply make no sense, like the Ravine of No Return (seriously, that's what the level is called) in which you have to avoid searchlights at night in order to keep your fire-breathing dragon hidden. News flash: fire-breathing dragons are self-illuminating because they breathe fire!

Not everything in Lair is horrifically skewed towards the lame though and the one thing that kept us from going crazy while playing was the exceptional musical score. Symphonic and every bit as epic as this game was supposed to be, the orchestral background music is just plain beautiful and easily the best feature of the entire game.

The genuine cutscenes that provide the storyline of Lair are well done and of sufficient graphical quality as to merit a second watch. Even the storyline itself is fairly engaging even if it is rather cliched and focused on tired themes that we've seen in every other fantasy game. Still, the presentation in the cinematics is pretty sweet, which is excellent because you'll find yourself falling back on them as one of the only sources of enjoyment in the whole game. Of course, that's little consolation for the gameplay.

Believe us, we can understand the attraction to Lair because it certainly sounds like an awesome game, but the execution is so terminally flawed in almost every way that a game can be flawed that it isn't worth anyone's time. We feel as though we were sold a bill of goods with Lair and those goods are simply not evident in the finished product. It's a shame really, because we really wanted Lair to be cool, but sadly it totally is not.