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It's a Flight Simulator, People

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 01, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The overly negative reviews for this game have a certain knee-jerk quality. No, it's not an FPS or 3dPS with a trailing camera that takes fifteen minutes to master. No, it's not an RPG-style story that emphasizes "character development" with lots of new moves and powers. At heart it's a flight simulator; it has sensitive controls, all the action takes place on the back of your dragon, and it has a series of "missions" that emphasize different skills and are re-playable if you enjoy mastering the controls and improving your performance on the individual missions. The story content is all about moving you from one mission to another in a somewhat plausible manner.
The game reminds me of my experience with F-16 Fighting Falcon on my old 286 machine. After 20 minutes of trying to play the game on a joystick I wanted to throw the thing through a plate glass window. After I got the hang of the game I played it over and over and it became one of my favorite diversions.

As for all the digs on the sixaxis controls, at least it's original, and it is a more sensitive control than the little thumbsticks are capable of being. I have not had any of the problems identified by the negative reviews, including the Gamespot reviewer, perhaps because I always approached the game as a flight simulator.

Bottom line, if the idea of a graphically stupendous, fantasy-genre flight simulator appeals to you, then play the game. If it doesn't, don't. But either way the game should be appreciated as something a bit more ambitious than the string of hackneyed, re-characterized knock-offs that have plagued the consoles this year. Console gaming appears to be going the way of movies--cautious publishers only willing willing to develop "the next Ninja Gaiden" or "the next Max Payne" or "the next Tom Clancy (literally)". At least Lair bucks that trend.

A dragon breath of fresh air

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: September 01, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Before playing Lair I read some scathing reviews on it, and of course the main criticism for the game is the controls. I've heard they are unresponsive, tortorous, sluggish, and many other names from critics, and regular gamers. Still after reading these reviews, I still wanted to play the game. I had a feeling that some of the people playing this game didn't take the time to learn the controls, and gave up on it, saying the game was poorly designed.Well I just recently got a PS3 and Lair was amongst the first games I bought, and after playing through and beating the game, I couldn't disagree with those people more.

Story: I'm not going to go too much into the story, involving the warring nations of Asylia and the Mokai, except to say I was impressed with what was there. It's not complex, but is very interesting and told very well through some great FMV cutscenes between levels. I really didn't think there would be a lot of story, figuring it would be like a typical action game, but I was wrong. Again, nothing complex, but better than your average action game. It's even emotional at times.

Graphics: The graphics in the game look really good. Mostly the colors are earthen, using a lot of browns, blacks, and greys, but they are still well done. Lots of details on the dragons of course, but also the other creatures like the giant manta bombers or huge warbeasts. The levels themselves all look great. As you fly past towers in the cities you will see decorative markings on them. The water isn't the best looking water I've seen, but it still looks nice, especially when the sun is reflecting on it. Fire effects look great of course, as well as explosions which look awesome.

Sound: The sound in the game is fantastic, from the voice acting, the screech of the dragons, explosions, and soldiers screaming as they catch on fire or are chomped on, all sound great. The music is good. Damn good. Like the story, I was shocked by how great the music was. In my opinion it would fit well into the Lord of the Rings trilogy. When I first started the game and went to the main menu, I stopped when I heard the music and sat there and listened to it before starting the game. It is that good.

Controls: A lot of bad things have been said about the controls. In my experience they work almost like a dream. Yes they do feel weird at first, but there are tutorials to help you out. The movement of the dragon in the air is entirely Sixaxis based motion controls that is supposed to simulate you using the reins of a dragon. Tilt the controller up, the dragon goes up, tilt down and she (the dragons you ride are female) goes down. Left and right the same. Flick up and the dragon does a cool 180 degree turn, flick down and she gets a burst of speed. Jerk the controller to the right or left and she does a dodge move in that direction. Square button shoots the fireballs, hold it down to shoot a stream, useful for taking out dozens of ground troops at once. Tapping the X button makes the dragon go faster, L1 or R1 is your lock on button, L2 or R2 is your brake button, and pressing those both together will make you hover, or land if you are near the ground. On the ground the left stick moves your dragon, circle makes her swipe, square again handles the fire, and pressing the triangle makes the dragon chomp on a soldier. Keep holding the triangle button down and the soldier gets devoured, replenishing your energy. The controls sound complex, but I really think with practice you can get used to them. I thought they were so good that I didn't even bother with the tutorials, after the second mission I was pretty comfortable with them, dodging fireballs left and right, tracking and taking down dragons. Sometimes the controls did some things I didn't want them to, like doing a speed dash instead of the 180, but these were few and far between, and never caused me to die or fail a mission. Overall I loved the controls, and think a lot of people just didn't take the time to learn them.

Gameplay: The game is very short, and can be beat over a weekend, but none of it is filler, and is all quality. Each mission is a little different and range from epic battles, escorting and protecting, a jail break, a somewhat stealth mission that had you avoiding spot lights, plus the occasional boss battle. Each mission has a variety of objectives, from protecting manta bombers, taking out a certain number of ground troops, destroying ballista emplacements, and just straight up dog fights, er, dragon fights.

Before playing the game I thought this would be a basic flying game, but again, I was wrong. Yes there are a lot of air battles, but you will be doing more. Landing on the ground and roasting, eating or swiping back ground troops never gets old. Sometimes when doing this the game will go into slow mo, and you will see the troops and armor pieces flying back from you strike. One particular moment, which I will never ever forget, that happened while I was engaging the troops on the ground was when I set dozens of them on fire, then knocking more down with my swipes,I finally had my dragon bite down on a lone soldier who somehow survived my previous slaughter. When I bit down on him, the game went into slow mo, the soldier writhing in pain screaming as blood spewed forth, and all around me the buring corpses of my foes, then my dragon swallowed him whole armor and all. It was a fantastic moment.

There will be times where you will actually get into a fist fight,or claw fight while in the air, with another dragon. When this happen you have different moves, you can breath fire on your opponent, swipe them with your claws, and bite them. You also get some combo moves. Like the swiping feeding move where your dragon swipes the other dragon, and bites the rider. Use this as the killing blow and you get a lot of energy back.

Another cool thing are the takedown moves. These are God of War style button pressing action sequences. These allow you to take down an enemy dragon or boss in a spectactular fasion. There are a variety of these scenes and they are very impressive. There are some boss fights, but not many. They are pretty good though, especially with the giant sea serpent, and I do mean giant.

To help fight your enemies, you have two types of lock on functions. A soft lock on, when the game automatically locks on to your opponent, which is shown by a white halo, and a hard lock on which happens when you press the lock on button. When this happens the halo turns red, and the game kind of takes over flying for you,and you just have to shoot at whatever it is that you are locked on to. With the soft lock on, which I mostly relied on, the fireballs you shoot home in on the target, making it easy to hit other dragons or gun emplacements. I had hardly any trouble with zeroing in on my targets. Like the controls the targeting takes some practice to get used to, but I thought it worked really well.

Cons: Now on to the bad stuff. Most people's problems stem from the controls. Mine is the waypoint system. There is no radar map to guide you around, only an arrow pointing you to your next objective which sounds good, but trust me, it's not as helpful as other games waypoint systems. Here is an example. In one mission you have to take out three generators to destroy some spot lights. The game points you toward the objective, and when you are near the objective, the arrow will vanish, signalling you that you are there. Now, there are no highlights on the generators, and trust me when I say that the generators in Lair don't look like normal generators. It took me a while to figure out what the generators looked like before I could destroy them. This happened a lot throughout the missions, the game telling you what you needed to do, but not properly highlighting your objective. It wasn't too major, and other gamers may not have a problem with it, but I sure did. Its made all the worse when you have multiple objectives. Like one mission where you had to destroy enemy ground troops on a slope, destroy the enemy ships, and take out other dragons. All of this can happen all at once, and you have to figure out what is the most dangerous threat. Again, nothing that can't be dealt with, but still annoying. That was my biggest problem with the game, but it still didn't detract from my enjoyment.

Well I hope this review was helpful. You'll notice that there are times where I said "I was wrong" about something. That is because this game kept shattering my expectations. It does so much that in my opinion it can't be called a simple flight game. I really really loved this game. I was excited while playing and it never felt dull or boring. Occasionally frustraing, but what game isn't? I think the game is vastly underrated and undeserving of the critical bashing it has taken. This is one of the most unique, fun, and refreshing games I have ever played and I will defend it if I ever get into a conversation about it. I'm sorry if my review was too long, and for any grammatical errors I made. I'm not the best speller, and even worse at punctuating, but hopefully I made it easy enough to understand, and hopefully help you in your decision on whether or not you will play this game. Thanks for taking the time to read my review.

Not worth the money

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 15, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I bought the game used because i wasn't going to pay the full price for it. I am glad I didn't pay the full price. The game is actually fun when the it is letting you do what you want to do. When trying to lock on you have to be close to your opponent (Fireballs auto lock for the most part). This wouldn't be so bad if the combat field were less chaotic. That leads to another problem. No radar, just an arrow. from a distance it is difficult to tell who is an enemy dragon and who is a friendly. Cut scenes unnecessarily interrupt the gameplay and then throw you right back into the fray with no warning. Combat fields are extremely chaotic at points with you being told to go do many different things at the same time.

The game is fun but wait to see if the price goes way down.
Pros: Gameplay is fun, cool storyline
Cons: Controls,

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