Lair

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Product Description

In Lair you'll try to survive in a world ravaged by endless conflict and natural disaster. You are Rohn, a warrior riding a voracious dragon trained for deadly aerial and ground combat -- skills which are now needed, as a call for peace turns into a bloodbath of betrayal and deceit. Your dragon is capable of scorching, clawing, and smashing thousands of enemies. You have the strength to defeat countless armies, but do you have the courage to save an entire civilization?

• Struggle on an epic scale as your civilization repels the onslaught of an unrelenting army
• Unleash your might through large-scale battles that span across both the sky and the ground
• Turn the tides of war with your ferocious dragon - Scorch the ground with flames and command the skies against vicious enemies
• Immerse yourself in a living, breathing world of voracious beasts, a deep storyline and visceral gameplay
• Fully supports the PlayStation 3 motion sensitive controller

Customer Reviews

Reviewed on 2008-07-05 Worst control system ever This game has the absolute worst control system I've ever seen. It's far too reliant on the sixaxis motion sensor and that means instead of actually controlling things, you must wildly fling the controller around in the HOPES that on screen items will come close to what you want.

Reviewed on 2008-06-20 yes it is awsome game I liked this compared to all the 360 dragon games. i have to say pretty darn good

Reviewed on 2008-06-15 Not worth the money 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,

Reviewed on 2008-04-28 Great potential which is ultimately squandered This longs to be epic. From the top-notch graphics to the grand orchestral score you will see potential in this title. Unfortunately, the promises made by the well-executed elements are offset by some core problematic issues. Pre-patch control: The SIXAXIS controls... What can be said that hasn't been said before. They are terrible. Your success rate using the controller will tend to hover around 50%. Sometimes the dragon will respond to your input and sometimes it won't. The action to make the dragon turn around, which requires you to pitch the controller up and toward your body, typically fails to cause any sort of reaction in the character. The "takedown" sequences use real-time events (a la God of War) but instead of pressing buttons you will move the controller itself. Again, this doesn't always provide the desired response. Often, it feels as if you are either moving the controller too much or too little. Ultimately, you will find it doesn't matter as all the various ways you attempt to use the motion controls will provide sloppy and unreliable control. Post-patch control: The SIXAXIS banishment patch could have fixed all the above problems but instead simply puts a band aid on them instead. Using the analog stick the dragon has the grace of a flying Mack truck. The controls seem delayed and your dragon never seems quite as agile as you'd like it to be. You will still need to employ the previously mentioned motion controls during "takedown" scenes, unfortunately. Other problems: The game runs at a proper 1080p resolution unlike so many of the Xbox 360 PS3 ports which clutter the library. It all looks wonderful until the frame rate drops below 10 FPS. This makes the dragon, which is already a handful, even more of a chore to pilot. Would I notice the difference between 10,000 troops on the field or 5,000? Probably not. Do I notice the difference between 30 FPS and 10 FPS? Absolutely. Factor 5 disagrees with my assessment and thusly the frame rate will chug when too many units are displayed on the screen. Another issue in the game both before and after the patch is the poorly implemented auto-targeting. It is often difficult to discern what you are currently targeting. Sometimes you will see a halo around unit selected and sometimes you won't. The game will choose what you are going to target and many times it gets it completely wrong. Want to take a bomb off the back of a Manta? Tough, you're targeting an enemy dragon instead. Need to destroy that objective right in front of you? Nope, you'll get something else. The game degrades into an exercise in trial-and-error. The bottom line: Lair is a great concept with terrible execution. The game will always be shackled with the legacy of a bad control scheme. No patch will be able to heal the issues which plague this game.

Reviewed on 2008-04-23 For those on the fence, here are some details; before and after the patch. 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.

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