Lair [PS3]

Sure, the FMVs are graphically impressive and so are parts of the gameplay, but there are lots of times I found myself rolling my eyes at what I was seeing on the screen -- I'm talking about tearing, square waves, a chugging framerate and water effects that look like sand.

Even if you could turn off the goodtime neutering Sixaxis controls -- and you can't -- the actual things you would be doing in the game would be a grab bag of neat and lame mechanics. Some levels will have you taking out troops on the ground via swipes or boats on the sea via fire, and that's fun. Other levels will have you fighting dragons, and that's lame.

That's right: the dragon fights in this dragon game are no good.

The takedowns -- which have you fly up on a foe, jump onto the beast, kill the pilot and take out the dragon via some quick action events -- are cool, but they seemed to be the minority. One of the more prevalent attacks had us flying side-by-side with a bad guy and shaking our controller left to right. Although it was unresponsive, eventually the controller would read the action and our dragon would drift into the side of the other dragon, which would then fall away and die. The next battle method had our dragon and the opposing dragon face to face falling toward the ground. Here, we'd hit square to stiffly blast the foe with fire breath and then alternate between X and circle for talon attacks that never appeared to connect. Sound cool? It wasn't, and that pretty much sums up Lair.

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