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So close, yet so far

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: September 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The controls hinder an otherwise exceptional game. I wouldn't go so far to say it's unplayable, but frustration with this game comes built-in, even if you have no expectations from the first time you hit start.

My personal status: 1.92 PS3 patch installed (played exclusively on it), through mission 6, all silver or bronze medals.

Let me start with what the game did very well: sound, graphics, voice acting, story, world building... these are all top notch and stunning in many ways. The color palette is a little over dark and bland, but visually that is the only ding I'd give the game. It is an otherwise beautifully built world. I love the full orchestral score and the surround sound is good. The medal system is a nice incentive, and reminds me a lot of their previous Rogue Squadron games, BUT the frustration with a medal system right now lies in the fact that you are fighting the controls more than the game objectives to squeeze the very most out of the game (more on that later). The dragon on the ground is very fun. There are no gesture controls, it's all with the stick. Imagine your dog versus plastic army men. Except now imagine hundreds of army men and your dog can breath fire. Good times.

Where the game felt average is in performance and navigation. There is A LOT going on in any given mission. Whole armies on the ground and in the sky, many different autonomous units all fighting. You feel like you are working your way through a real and chaotic battlefield in every dimension. This is good and bad: good to feel so immersed, bad in that it's very hard to figure out priorities, objectives and even just a basic sense of geography with so much movement. A mini-map of some sort would help tremendously, even a fricking compass + some device to give you a sense of altitude and relative position to the ground would be a huge asset. You're supposedly on the side of the more sophisticated/advanced society, you'd think their dragon riders would have some tools beyond a whip-club thing to control and navigate with. Rage vision tries to help you determine objectives, but it shouldn't burn your rage meter; it should be something available by default (think: Samus' visor). The game will get bogged down with too much going on, but nothing that brings it below what I felt to be 5-10 fps; most times it felt 20-30+ fps. Given how much you can do in their world (from land to air, complete freedom in all degrees, all seamless transitions), it's pretty staggering. Lastly, the camera control is definitely hard to do even basically well (it's done via the sticks) given you are trying to tilt, turn and shake your controller around just to move.

What the game falls down badly in is the control of the dragon. The complaints about the controls are valid, although exaggerated on both ends of the spectrum. The basic movement controls are decent if not a little sluggish (turn right/left, ascend, descend), but the gesture controls are absolutely horrid. Dash and 180 in particular, some very needed maneuvers with such a huge beast, make me wonder if their QA department for gesture based controls were on vacation at the time. Most times when I intend to do a dash I'll 180, or vice versa. Extremely frustrating. The dodge/ramming movements are not bad, not the most responsive, either.

I really want to like this game. It's as if someone has given you a Ferarri and when you step into the drivers seat instead of finding a steering wheel you're given a little hot wheels car that you move around to make things work. Just because things can be mapped to motion, doesn't necessarily mean those movements will work best for control :).

Bottom line: This game is playable with the ability to muddle through many parts and still finish a mission with little "mastery" of the oddball controls. But the frustration is very high for more fine tuned control that would help you achieve better medals for each mission. With so many good games coming out right now, I can't see spending much more time with this one given the frustration level. If a patch were released to address control (basic turning can stay, remove gestures!) and navigation (mini-map, compass, altimeter, as a start), I'd probably drop everything and pick it up again. The production values of the rest of the game are just that good, it's a pity the controls (or the lack of them, really) strangle the fun out of this vibrant world.

Dissapointing

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 10
Date: September 04, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Was hoping for a revolutionary game, but it turns out the controls were to convoluted and confusing to really work well and create a fun game. They should have allowed for traditional controls, but rather instead force you to use the "Six Axis" controls. It seems many of the reviews of the game coming out are pretty accurate in this respect. I was hoping that the developers would take extra time to fix these issues as they did delay the game; but it seems they didn't have enough time to address these issues. This game could have been great, but is ultimately held back by the restrictive and confusing control scheme. Rent if you're not 100% sure you want this game, as you may not want to spend full price only to find it's not as good as you thought it would be.

A worthy way to show off your PS3!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: September 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

From the moment I first saw the trailers for Lair, I knew I'd buy it as soon as I could! Now that I've had a week to play around with it, I must say I'm overall impressed. This game has incredible graphics, an outstanding soundtrack, unbelievable surround sound, and an innovative control scheme.

You play as Rohn, who must fight to save his fellow Asylians from their northern neighbors, the Mokai. You ride your dragon and engage in brutally intense aerial battles. You will destroy other dragons, destroy catapults, giant rhinos, and even incinerate, trample and eat foot soldiers! The game is mission-based with the ability to unlock specials depending on how well you carry out your task.

As far as the game quality, it's use of the PS3's power is definitely impressive. While I've heard the controls described as unresponsive and clumsy, I've actually found them to be quite good! It's a totally different experience to control yourself by tilting the controller. However, your dragon is fairly incapable of doing quick, sharp turns...and this makes some missions more difficult than necessary. The missions are intense, but sometimes it is difficult to tell who are the Asylians and who are the Mokai. If you don't have a high-definition TV, good luck with that one, since the details will be lost.

One more nagging annoyance I have is how the wonderful music will play through a scene, then abruptly cut off as it starts a new one. I think they should've made the transitions more seamless. However, this is a minor cosmetic issue and has no bearing on the gameplay.

So is this a classic, timeless game? Not by a long shot. But it is a worthy PlayStation 3 title that'll keep you occupied for a while.

Excelent

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: October 30, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Once in a while a game is considered awesome; otherwise there are tons of just good games. This game is definitely awesome. The control is good, the quality is great and game play is very compelling. You'll find it very hard to even take breaks from this game.

A lot of huffing and puffing, but some great flame-throwing fun

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: October 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The dependency on SIXAXIS motion-sensor controls will throw a fair few people, and will leave many frustrated. I got stuck once or twice on a couple of levels because the controller wouldn't respond exactly as required in split-second instances.
If you're going to grasp the spirit of the game you have to rationalise the fact that you are, er, flying dragons - huuuuuge cumbersome beasties which (if they existed) would be unable to rotate on a pinhead. Hence flying around can feel a little stilted if you've been spoon-fed on free-and-instantaneous 360-degree movement in other games.
The SIXAXIS is a great way for player control - it's just this game that does it a misjustice. Additionally, some of the combo attacks aren't as easy to execute as Sony the developers would like us to think. Example: the level where you bludgeon the two giant sea-serpents' eyes out feels like you are reliant on the console automatically doing it for you, not through your own handiwork (although it IS supposed to your effort).
Aesthetically speaking, the game's visuals are frequently exquisite. Both in-game and in cutscenes, the graphical texture can be that of velvet. It's kind of showcase stuff, although no doubt within a matter of months other (and overall better) games will be pushing the PS3 graphics engine to the limit in terms of the eye-popping visual delivery we really hoped the PS3 would bring us.
In a nutshell: Lair is visually compelling, unfortunately challenging from a manual not a skill-set perspective, but really rather tremendous fun if torching humans to death with an all-flying 20-tonne scaly flame-thrower dings your dong. Good soundtrack, too.
Lair

Good Game ! ! ! !

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: December 03, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is very good, the controls are not that difficult. At the beginning I was having trouble controlling the dragon, it turns out that my ps3 controller was not working properly. Great graphics, you won't be disappointed.

For those on the fence, here are some details; before and after the patch.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: April 23, 2008
Author: Amazon User

By now all of the back and fourth between "This game is epic!" and "This game is epic fail!" is probably giving those of you who are considering Lair a few headaches. A lot of press reviewers hate it, a lot of user reviewers love it, the creator of Bioshock defended it and there are mixed reviews abroad. The controversy is mainly around the controls/gameplay so that will be my focus, primarily sticking to the technical details. I picked up this game on clearance at a local retailer since they had it on clearance and I will do my best to collect the facts together from my experiences since simply yet another opinion might not be too helpful at this point.

First and foremost, as action oriented as this game is, it is NOT for the impatient. The title does not lend itself well to anyone who feels it shouldn't be necessary to put effort into liking a game. I'll explain in a bit.

Julian Eggebrecht (the game's Director) mentioned in an interview with G4 that, unlike Factor 5's previous games, the dragon you fly has real weight and physics attached to the flight simulations thanks to the PS3's super-de-duper Cell processor. They wanted banking to "feel heavy" when using the Sixaxis controller as your dragon's fat rump flings through the air across your screen. What this means is that the beast is not ever going to turn on a dime, even if your Sixaxis will. Needless to say, turning an intense action game into a fantasy flight simulator pushes up the learning curve considerably, let alone adding an extra level of skill required to line up even the simplest of shots.

Motion Control:
How the Sixaxis flight controls actually function is more absolute than relative. If you want your dragon to fly straight, you hold the controller level and if you want to pull up, you tilt the controller up. While this sounds pretty straightforward on the surface, what often throws me off is the "absolute" nature of this. If you want to keep pulling up, you have to keep the controller held vertically and if you want to hold a nose dive you have to hold the face of the controller away from you for as long as you want to hold the dive. If they were to make this more like other flight-sims, tilting the controller up would control the rate-of-change rather than the absolute angle. Having played a handful joystick flight-sims I found myself leveling out the controller at times I wanted to hold my incline or descent, but ended up leveling out myself instead. Horizontal banking is a bit more intuitive even with its absolute nature so long as you do not mind the massive delay for your overweight, infantry munching dragon to respond to the Sixaxis' orientation.

Before the patch, there were a couple of waggle functions I did not particularly like at all. Thrusting the controller forward would effectively be a speed boost. Quickly lifting the controller upward would do a midair 180. The problem is the game only understood my gestures three out of four times and every once in a while it would confuse which gesture I was trying to perform. Also, there is a full second delay after you perform the gesture before the dragon performs the action. Having motion controls for these also disturbs your flight control for obvious reasons.

After the patch, they bound those two waggle functions to D-Pad Left for 180 and D-Pad Right for boost (those buttons were previously unassigned). I find these to be much more responsive and predictable. The motion for 180 remains, but they took out motion control for boost to avoid any input confusion.

Analog Control:
I have played with the motion controls for quite a bit (I do not want to say "extensively") before that 245MB Lair patch landed on PSN. So how does the analog controls compare to the default Sixaxis? Let's just say that after toying with the analog mode in a previously played mission to get a feel for it, I jumped straight into the Hard flight course and beat my previous best time by 30 seconds. While the dragon still maneuvers like a starving whale, I had a MUCH easier time actually flying *through* the rings. Thinking "maybe I'm just getting used to the physics of the game" I went back and did the course again with the sixaxis. Try as I might, I could not even beat my previous best let alone come anywhere near what I did with the analog.

The kicker for me was that I actually know what the extremities are on the analog stick because I know how the analog stick works. With the sixaxis I kind of have to pick an angle and just kind of hope my dragon does what I want it to do in due time. If you're patient, the tilt controls can be fun, but if you've watched the "mastering the beast" video on Amazon page for this very product, I would say those developers were drinking the kool aid if they honestly felt they could remove the analog controls from the game when the Sixaxis was introduced to them by Sony.

In the same interview with Eggebrecht that I've mentioned earlier, the Director felt that the controversy was that gamers were more or less set in their ways because novices liked the tilt controls and the core gamers didn't. I think the real story here is that the novice gamers don't really know what they were missing and were just stoked that they could control a dragon by moving a controller around. While I do feel the sixaxis control in Lair could be improved, it doesn't really end there.

Targeting:
Any target that enters your dragon's direct line of sight gets a subtle white glow on it, hitting R1 or L1 will lock on and the glow will turn red to indicate as such. While locked-on your camera will always face the target regardless of which way you are flying, though you will generally orbit any target you are locked on to. Your dragon will autoaim on anything with the white glow without having to lock on which is extremely handy.

The quirk here is that there are a LOT of any potential targets on any given battlefield and it's very easy to switch to an unwanted target the very second you hit the shoulder button. Advisably, you should only lock on to standouts like objectives, turrets or the tougher dragons you wish to execute take downs on. Trying to target everything you strike will give seizures to players with even the mightiest constitution.

The patch added an option to turn on Crosshairs which produces a Starfox style reticle. I highly suggest using this because it instantly cleared up how the heck the game was picking its targets as well as having the sixaxis control actually make some degree of sense.

If you think that's a lot to forgive, it is. There is an enjoyable game to be found here, but like I said, it'll require patience.. even at half the price. If you think these quirks are minor enough for you to give it a try, well.. there's more.

Missions:
Without giving too much away, various missions do offer variety, but most of them will have you fending off several fronts at once without a good way at letting you know which forces need to be prioritized, so it is largely a game of trial and error the first run through.

There is an arrow that vaguely points to the direction of your current objective and it only appears if the game thinks you are ridiculously lost. If you are anywhere near the action (often when you need it most) the arrow vanishes. Just... keep your eyes wide open and watch where you're going.

While the replay value of this game is much higher than what you might expect, the first run through will drive you nuts. When diving into a new level with a billion things going on, it's very easy to lose your bearings. The moment you are about to figure out where you are in relation to the action, the game interrupts with a cutscene, introducing a new threat and throwing you off. Once you recover from that, you'll get hit with another cutscene. Then they'll do it again. Even in the earlier missions they cutscene the crap out of you. I LIKE cutscenes, but even I think Lair pushes it to the point of silliness. Of course once you actually played through a mission once or twice, you know where the triggers are and where the threats are and that's the point the game becomes enjoyable.. if you can get past the controls.

I give Lair three out of five stars. It is not without issues and I believe they could have made the game much more accessible than they did, it is not a complete disaster. It's a game. Think about the functionality I've described and see if you can picture it fitting your play style. If your primary game is action-simulation, flying or driving, with a strong desire to burninate, you'll likely find something to enjoy here. If you're all about the first person shooter with lightning quick reflexes, steer clear.

Peice of ART!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: September 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I was about to cancell my order after the horrible reviw at GameSpot!
but i saw some users review and i know Gamespot is Bill$$ tool so i just give it a try yes i bought it, i played the first mission i was confused and the controlle was so new to me! after 30 minutes i get used to it and begin to master the controll, this game is a prfect game! i myself didn't like the SIXAXIS but after i master it i enjoyed it so much, the sound effect is the best EVER (i played it on 5.1) no wonder THX did the sound effect! the graphic is so beatiful if u r not sure just rent it and u will see by ur self what a great game it is, i want the Soundtrack and the Artbook if it's available, there is an ART gallery in the game show the Building, Characters and the game's wonderful Cretures art and sketch, i just feel so sad of what is happing to the Video Game world so UNFAIR reviews just becuase u don't like this company or this console! this Game is the prove and a real example of what is happing.

Lovely Artwork; the Gameplay Doesn't Hold Up

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: February 16, 2008
Author: Amazon User

A dragon-based flying game, similar to Drakengard or Panzer Dragoon, "Lair" was touted as the cutting-edge hit for the PS3. Does it measure up?

The story begins in ancient times - a peaceful civilization is wracked by a disaster (a giant eruption of volcanoes). The survivors split into two groups: the peaceful and knowledgable Asylians in the bountiful mountains, and the technological Mokai on the desolate plains. The Mokai attack the Asylians, hoping to take some of their food so their people don't starve to death. After a few battles, it is the hope of both sides that they can come to an agreement, but the Diviner, the spiritual leader of the Asylians, wishes to continue the conflict. Almost from the get-go, Lair has a hamhanded approach to the story - even before the religious leader is shown to be aggressive and bloodthirsty (which occurs pretty early on) the characters make blatant, out-of-character anti-religious statements. The story has some convoluted twists - the assassination of the peace-wanting leaders of each nation in the same meeting by an open agent of the zealotous religious leader leads each side to believe that the other was responsible, despite the fact that a member of each side witnessed the meeting and survived (but, for whatever reason, didn't tell anyone). The story is basically there to justify "red army fights blue army".

The gameplay is probably the worst part of the game. The dragon you ride can breathe fire (either as a stream or as individual blasts) and is "steered" using the motion sensor. However, the controls do not handle particularly well and tend to be overly sensitive - or not enough. The flight is awkward, and the lock-on system only works if the enemy is a short distance directly in front of you (thus making it annoying and useless in a dogfight). Specialized combat sequences include mid-air melees (involving proper button input at close range and a side-swipe subgame when you get close to enemy dragons) and ground attacks (either strafing from the air or landing on the ground and wading into the battle). The controls on almost all of these are clunky and ineffectual, making combat and flight frustrating beyond the limits of fun.

The graphics are a mixed bag: on the one hand, the designs and style are fantastic (viewable through unlockable concept art, most of which is only barely noticaeble in the game such as soldiers' armor), but on the other hand the overuse of lighting and bloom makes the backgrounds almost impossible to see most of the time. Sure, it's great when you have fantastic vistas, architecture, and costumes (all with a vague hint of a "Shadow of the Colossus" style), but the combination of the over-exposure to light and the awkward, jerky controls means that nobody will be able to enjoy them. As mentioned, there is a concept art gallery, and the game might be worth playing through just to unlock all of it. In-game, however, it doesn't really seem to matter.

The sound is good, but has such a feeling of being overdone in almost every single way; the music and voice acting both seem so awkwardly familiar, with the same tones and the same musical style as seen in so many other games. It's not bad, but it's just incredibly familiar sounding - in a bad way.

As a whole, this game has one thing going for it: the art. That might be enough in some areas, but since this is supposed to be a game, not a gallery, it doesn't seem particularly forgivable.

This game gets a 4/10.

The flying RULES!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: September 14, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The best part of this game is the flying with the six-axis controller. It is quite intuitive which makes the game very immersive. It works very well most of the time. Turning is a long, slow arc and it's difficult to find a target you were just attacking after one. A solution they put in place is a 180 flip. To do this you yank the controller straight up. Unfortunately, this only works maybe 30% of the time. That leads to a lot of profanity.

The graphics are great but the story is lame and it's very repetitive.

It does have cool extras like behind the scenes featurettes, music pices and production art.

This game can be frustrating because the levels get fairly difficult quickly and it's not always clear what you're supposed to be doing.

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