Low Price Lair

So a friend of mine has had Lair for quite a while, and he never played through it. The main gripe, like many others, was the fact that the controls sucked. He knew there was a PSN update which allowed analog controls, but decided to stick to Uncharted 2 and Demon's Souls regardless, and who can blame him? This is where I come in. I borrowed Lair from my friend a couple of weeks ago, and sat down to play it yesterday.

At first glance, Lair is beautiful! Running at 1080p, and using eye candy galore, Lair obviously was not spared on the production value for graphics side of things. Although the ground units all are fairly simple and not very detailed, the main character models and cut-scenes are amazing! Although the camera can get a little crazy at times, it isn't a huge deal if you're patient with the game, and in my opinion doesn't have any affect on the shear beauty of this game.

On the controls front, I'll admit I did get frustrated at times. When doing a lock-on the camera goes into a cinematic view which really makes it harder for one to keep a bearing on where you are afterwards. Sometimes I would lock onto catapults to fire at them; instead, my dragon would swoop down and clamp on to them. This would require I shake the Wii-mo, I mean PS3 Dual Shock up and down vigorously so my dragon could basically rip the catapult from its base so I could toss it. The fairly bad lock-on system coupled with the fact that your flight controls are inverted no matter what definitely make the controls part of this game bring down it's overall rating from me.

Gameplay to me in a game like this is very important. I liked the fact that there were a few different things one could do with the dragons, not just basically "dog-fight" with other dragons. There were the rhinos, warbeasts, catapults, ships, and other miscellaneous objectives that were set to be destroyed. Allowing three lives per level made it fairly easy to complete each level, but you still had to complete the level well if you wanted to receive medals for it. The game only has about 14 levels, though, so there really isn't much replay value. I think all-in-all it took me MAYBE 5 hours to complete the entire game, which just isn't acceptable. I expected the game to be fairly short, but not this much so. The absence of PS3 trophies also discouraged me from wanting to go back and do more, although there are online leaderboards.

Overall, I think this is a fairly decent game that got a very bad initial review due to the hype disappointment. The graphics and sounds are stunning, the controls are just meh, and the replay value is meh as well. I would say borrow it from a friend like I did, or buy it on [...] for under 10 bucks. It's definitely worth at least a look before writing it off as some others have.Get more detail about Lair.