Lair

The worst problem with Lair isn't the functionally worthless control scheme. It's not the tedious plot, or even graphics that make the dragons (you know, the stars of the game) look like Attack of the Wing-ed Clones. Nope, the worst part about playing Lair is all of these factors combine to make the game repetitive after 10 minutes of play.

The graphics aren't great, especially in comparison to other titles on the Playstation 3. When they're not cloaked in darkness for a night-time mission, each level is typically a bland sea of brown or blue. You'll spend most of your game staring at your dragon's behind, so you'd think they'd have put some effort into at least that - the dragon looks ok up close, but the camera view is far enough away that it's an nondescript flying blob. When you're fighting other dragons they all look the same, and this isn't something you have to wait very long to notice either - in the first mission you'll be identifying your enemies by one of two ways.
1. From far away, you'll know they're bad because they shoot blue projectiles instead of red ones.
2. Close up, enemies are grey-brown instead of brown.
Eventually you have to fight different enemies, like a giant bull or a flying manta ray, and all of these are rendered nicely, though unsurprisingly multiple enemies are just clones.

The story and characters are as uninteresting and bland as the graphics. You play Rohn, a dragon-knight tasked with defending his country against a neighbouring one, with smatterings of betrayal and a twist. I haven't seen writing this lazy since Stephen King's accident. The story is just a vessel to carry you from one mission to another - it's told rather blandly through a mixture of in-game cutscenes and a voice-over before each mission - and I found myself skipping whatever I could to shorten my agony.

This brings us to the Pièce de résistance of Lair... The SixAxis control scheme. In case you've missed the coverage this game has gotten since its release in the US, Lair relies solely on using the tilt-a-ma-jig technology embedded in their PS3 control pads. To go left you tilt it left, to go right you tilt right, and so on. To do a quick 180 degree turn, you jerk the control pad up quickly. Or maybe down quickly. They both had the same level of success.

Speeding up your dragon is a matter of tapping the X button continuously, which doesn't get tedious or annoying at all, no sir. Attacking anything requires the planets aligning. If the targeting system actually finds something for you, and you notice the targeting icon (it's practically invisible),- and you haven't passed the target because dragonfire range is 12 metres or so... then you press square to shoot a fireball. Repeat ad nauseum to kill everything you can barely see. There are other attacks, like melee and boarding, but these are just button mashing sequences that chew up more time then they're worth.

At the start of the game I found I was often confused about just how important my role was to the conclusion of the missions. There's no question that I was not good at the game, and yet I kept completing them with ease - this is until out of nowhere the game ramped up the difficulty. The rest of the game is one giant escort mission, the absolute worst mission type ever. This pretty much sums up the entire Lair experience.

All of these factors combine to make the most frustrating and repetitive game I've played since Dungeons & Dragons Tactics. The only time the monotony is broken is when you instinctively hit an analog stick to dodge incoming fire and the camera is thrown around instead. There are a few redeeming factors in the game. It will make you appreciate your sound system, as it sounds great. The cut-scenes, droll as they are, typically look nice despite the rest of the game. And it's the first English language game to support PSP Remote Play. I couldn't get it to work because it wanted me to update my firmware and that was an hour of effort I wasn't putting in for this game.

Lair isn't a game. It's an exercise in frustration, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. It's cinematic when you're not playing - Factor 5 should have run with this. Maybe it could have been DragonHeart 3 instead of just DragonHeart 3: The Interactive Experience. I wouldn't pay $14 to see DragonHeart 3 though, let alone spend $100 on Lair.