Lair -PS3- 6

May 30, 2023

This was an interesting one to play. Lair was hyped up as an early ps3 title that would implement the sixaxis to control a flying dragon. Unfortunately, critics panned the game for its motion controls, and it flopped upon release. I picked it for a dollar at the Salvation Army last year, because I wanted to judge it for myself. Well, I finished it just now, and I have some mixed feelings. The medieval setting and graphics were cool, the story&cutscenes were entertaining enough, the sweeping soundtrack was outstanding, and the idea of controlling your dragon is awesome. Now about those motion controls...there are times when you get used to them and they seem to respond okay, and other times where they do indeed feel broken. In particular when the action gets very bombastic during the big battle scenes. (“Crossing at Dawn”, the fifth stage is where this becomes especially apparent.) I will say that most of the time, I got the motion controls to work for me (once I got used to them). But there were at least a few levels that made me want to pull my hair out. In spite of that, I persevered, and now that I’ve beaten the game, I can say it was still okay overall. I shall give “Lair” a 6 out of ten. The game has problems, but I still had some fun with flying my dragon around and blowing stuff up…most of the time. And that soundtrack is excellent. There was a lot of potential for a great, exhilarating experience here. It’s a shame that the developers didn’t fine tune the controls more. They are not quite as bad as the critics said, but they definitely hurt the experience. I believe there was a patch that improved them a little after release. I played with the patch on, because it downloaded automatically when I booted the game up. I also tried the analogue controls, but they felt worse than the motion controls for me.