A REAL review for people that are interested in LAIR!
Since people like graphics so much these days I'll start with that. The environments in this game are simply breathtaking. If you have a HDTV, this game will absolutely blow your mind, from the looks for the surroundings, to the dragons, to the amazing water, LAIR is simply one of the best looking games ever seen on a console.
The controls in this game do take a little bit of getting used to, however they are not nearly as abysmal as most of the reviewers are saying. The controls work pretty well, tilt left to move left, tilt right to move right, tilt down to dive and pull up to rise. Then there is the 180 turn which most people are having troubles with or say "Don't work half the time". Well it's because they don't know how to do it. It took me a little practice (maybe a level of actually trying to figure out how to do it) but it's quite simple. For the most part make sure you are almost flying straight and not in a little turn or anything like that, then pull up REALLY fast towards your forehead (don't hit your head of course) and you'll do the what people call "Impossible 180 turn" with ease. Once I learned that the trick is to pull really fast up and towards your forehead you can do it almost as many times as you want. I've probably failed once out of my last 100 attempts with it.
The controls are a bit sensitive as well so tilting a bit too fast could get you flying all over the place. Target locking is pretty easy as basically what's directly in front of your dragon will usually be the target or something close to it. You hold your L1 or R1 button to keep a constant lock on your target, pretty much until it's dead. It works pretty well, although you won't always get what you want to target. The missions in the game are pretty well developed, although you are always killing a ton of dragons and enemies on the ground (YES you can land your dragon and destroy the puny humans on the ground), the missions them self require you to guard people or Mantas, destroy certain targets, and having to use your sixaxis controller to clamp on to objects and keep pulling up and down till you rip the object or building down. Missions are not as "Precise" as some people are saying. Sure you can't go spend 5 minutes flying around looking at the scenary without failing the mission, but if you are pretty much following the directions, you have plenty of time to do things, although it is a little fast paced. Take for example the third mission where you have to protect your grain ship, you have to take out catapults at first, some which you can take out in the air really quick, and others it's faster to land and take them out. You have like a window of 3 - 4 minutes to take out 10 or so catapults before the mission says you have dragons incoming to take out. Dragons for the most part are pretty easy to take out, you lock on spew a few fireballs and they die, only really exception would be dark dragons, in which case you can use special moves to take them out quicker. In any case I've played through the game once and I haven't died that much, and have failed a mission no more than once per mission so far. (I've only failed 3 missions total once mainly because the fact I didn't know exactly where everything is).
The boss battles are really well done, and for ONCE in a game feel like it's a boss. These are not bosses that are killed in like 30 seconds work. They take usually 4 or 5 minutes to beat and require you to weaken them first before you can actually start doing a lot of damage or kill them.
The sounds and voice overs are really well done, albeit a bit repetitive when your in a mission. The cut scenes are beautiful and the story is decent. It isn't exactly immersive but you have some plot twists and you can get a pretty decent sense of what is actually going on in this world. All in all LAIR is actually a pretty fun game, that has a "Learning Curve" for the controls. It's not a really hard game on the default settings, however until you spend an hour learning the controls to it's fullest you might have some difficulties on some of the missions where it requires you to have a little bit more control of your dragon. The controls are not as bad as people are saying, especially the over exaggeration of "I'm tilting left why am I turning right" garbage. If you are titling left and turning right, that wall right beside you might have something to do with it people!!!
If you want to spend the money on this game then you'll get a lot of good fun out of it and probably beat it in 1 weekend of moderate play. If anything it's a GREAT rental and I recommend this game to anybody that is a fan of tons of killing involving dragons and a nice sense of environment ..... that is if you take the little time to learn the controls and not get so frustrated so easily with them.