Lair: First Impressions
Save for the fact that my cousins got me this game, everything else about it is crap, at least for the first 5 missions, because that was where I stopped. Lair is set in a fantasy-medieval era, where the Uruk-hai, sorry, Mokai are at war with the Asylians because of some volcano that blew up both their homelands and they decided to blame each other for it. You control Rohn, an elite member of the Asylian Sky Guard, which basically means that you sit on a dragon and let your pet do the fighting for you.
Factor 5 attempted to shoehorn the SixAxis’s motion sensor function by making the entire game control that way. In order to navigate your dragon around, the controller has to physically tilt left/right or up/down. It feels like they were rejected for developing the game for the Wii and they decided to project it onto the PS3 instead, with disastrous results. The controls are extremely sensitive, yet horrendously inaccurate. A brief tilt downwards would send my dragon diving to the bottom, and at one point, when I tilted my controller left, the dragon wound up going right. Maybe the up/down function messed with the left/right controls or something, so I suppose my controller was pointing UP while I was tilting LEFT, which probably made the dragon very confused, and decided to go RIGHT instead.
The whole ‘wrist-flick’ maneuvers were horrendous as well. Apparently if you want to make a 180 degree turn, you have to flick the controller… upwards? Not that the odd directional positioning mattered, at any rate. I was never able to flick my controller fast enough, and sometimes the dragon would make a speed dash instead, which put me even further away from where I was supposed to be.
I won’t gripe about the believability of the wide turns, but in essence, it’s a horrendous thing to navigate with when you’re in battle. There’s a dragon on your right! Okay, tuuuuurn… take your time, whatever. By that time you’ve actually lined that enemy up in your sight, he’s firebombed you and disappeared. The wide turns got even more annoying at the end of the last mission I played, which was killing off enemies on a straight, tiny bridge. Doing turns on that bridge was a nightmare.
It was incredibly hard to do accurate navigation, as a result. On one occasion I had to navigate my way through an arch, and apparently I didn’t dip low enough or a wing wasn’t in range of the hole or whatever, so I wound up bouncing off the damned architecture and had to circle my way around it instead. I was subsequently accosted by the wide turn problem again, where I had to fly off into the distance in order to properly position myself and come back facing the right direction.
After I had firebombed the dragon quota, they sent in a bunch of ‘Tauros’ on the bridge, and I was supposed to wipe them out. This was where the fault of the lock-on system came into play. I could not get a proper lock on any of the tiny Tauros on the bridge. The computer did the locking-on for me, and half the time I would swoop near a Tauros only to realize the computer had targeted a nearby catapult instead, and I would be faced with a big brick wall while the camera tried to get back into place. Other times had me attempting to target the Dark dragons, and having hit the ‘dive’ button, I would suddenly swoop 50 miles away from the bridge to target some shitty ice dragon. I then had to do the laborious wide turn and then fly all the way back, while my allies were shouting at what a moron I was for leaving the battleground.
The bugs in this game are of mention, seeing as bugs don’t bother me most of the time (I had freezing issues like everyone else on Assassin’s Creed, but unlike the other anal fanbois, I just reset the game and tried again) and I don’t actively try to break the game. These bugs were bad. I had some incredible screen tearing on the fourth mission that I couldn’t see where I was going (not like I knew where I was anyway), and the clincher came in the fifth mission.
I was flying under said archway when this dragon decided to attack me from behind. Apparently the game wasn’t prepared for that, because all of a sudden, I was stuck under the arch. After giving my controller a good shake my dragon broke free, but the camera wasn’t. I was still looking through the archway while my dragon flew off and merged with a bunch of other equally similar looking dragons in the distance. Whenever I tilted the controller left or right the camera would do the same, and I found myself staring at castle walls, or the camera would bypass the wall entirely and I’d be looking at the interior of the castle, which was a black screen. Soon after, for some inexplicable reason, I was reunited with Rohn and co. again. As usual, I was 50 miles off to sea after this shenanigan and everyone was yelling at me for being an idiot. The game then abruptly ended because I didn’t maul enough dragons on time or something (yeah, being stuck under a fucking archway would do that).
Speaking of which, there should have been some counter to note how many targets are left before you advance to the next level. I couldn’t see the Tauros at all, and I had to make a couple of passes on the bridge (coupled with horrendous navigation, wide turns, squinting and getting motion sickness) before I actually nailed every last one. The game congratulated me by having the enemy drop Rhinos on the bridge. They were dispatched in exactly the same way as the Tauros, except now you had to shake your controller up and down like you were having a seizure before the dragon finally picked him up and threw him into the sea.
Since this game was touted Blu-ray and supposedly plays fantastic on 1080i resolution, that automatically meant it would look like crap on my 14 inch TV screen. Everything is supposedly rendered in ‘gorgeous detail’, but the little soldiers on the ground just looked like shimmering dots on my screen. I had to adjust the damn screen size, and even the options menu seemed to insult me for it - they titled it ‘adjust frame size’, which I felt was a completely moronic choice of words. I scrolled up and down the options menu looking desperately for ’screen’, ‘resolution’ or ‘widescreen?’ and by luck I decided to try this frame size thing out. I didn’t have any display problems with Assassin’s Creed (save for the tiny font), so I’m just going to chalk it up to Lair being stupid.
I suppose my ‘first impressions’ has gotten way out of hand, so I’ll just stop here. Overall, I don’t like Lair. Nothing is good about it; not even the aesthetic side of it. The voice actors all sound gruff in varying degrees of deepness, the soundtrack sounds like Troy’s (complete with Incoherent Female Wailer), and the story is pretty much ‘we’re at war, go beat the bad guys’. I suppose if you like playing with a retarded version of the Wii you just might enjoy Lair.
