Lair is the perfect example of a hyped game gone horribly wrong.
Lair is a story of war, set in an ancient world. The land was wrought with volcanos, and aside from molten lava and smoke being belched into the air, a force of evil was released as well. Dragons and other powerful creatures were soon harnessed by two factions: the Mokai, and the Asylians. Always at odds with one another, one thing became certain; dominate the sky, dominate the land. You play as the Asylian Rohn, mounting your own dragon on a journey to discover which side should ultimately become victorious.
Lair is akin to a patient just wheeled in to the ER, suffering from multiple traumas. Doctors don't even know where to begin with what's wrong. For starters, the controls are an absolute mess. Before an update in 2008 that allowed for analogue movement, using the SIXAXIS's motion sensing features was the only way to control your dragon. You tilt the controller left or right to go left or right, shove it foward to dash, and jerk it upwards to do a 180 turn.
Factor 5 shot themselves in the foot by forcing this touchy and unresponsive control scheme on gamers. It was a novel idea, but very poorly executed. The learning curve was just too steep. The reception by both reviewers and every day gamers over Lair's controls was so unwelcome that Sony's PR team sent out press kits to instruct them on how to play it. Factor 5 stood behind their control scheme, but eventually yielded to gamers' demands to include optional analogue support.
If you're going to play Lair, make sure you download that update. If you get the hang of the SIXAXIS controls, then more power to you, but you'll save yourself a lot of headaches if you simply adapt to the analogue controls from the start. You're still going to have control issues, though, as just about every other mechanical factor works against you in both maneuvering and combat.
There is a ton of chaos going on in Lair at almost all times. You have your ally dragons, your enemy dragons, troops on the ground, ships on the sea, massive warbeasts and flying manta ray bombers. To make it easier to distinguish between friend or foe, you can press the down button to enter Rage Vision, which will dim the colors to black and white and highlight your targets red. The problem is, sometimes you'll have to be closer to your targets to get them to show up. Also, several times you'll be jerked out of Rage Vision and your camera will fling you around, completely disorientating you. Creatures that you've already killed will also still show up in this mode, further adding to the confusion.
The targetting system also works against you, making the combat an arduous affair. On some foes, the targetting works ok, but on others, it won't target-lock until you're too close for comfort. You can be firing on a cannon, for instance, still flying towards it trying to get close enough to establish a target lock when all of a sudden, an enemy dragon will cross your flight path and will get locked on instead, jolting you around and throwing you completely off kilter. You'll also get tossed around sometimes when you've destroyed an enemy and the lock-on disappears. Another infuriating incident is when you destroy a tower or outpost, yet the system still has you targetting it for no good reason.
The camera is also a deadly enemy you'll constantly struggle with. It swings wildly around at inopportune times, zooms in and out when you don't to, and tends to usually focus on areas that don't warrant any notice. It's also a complete mess when you're on the ground. It's too hard to manipulate it when you need to, making finding your enemies a complete pain.
The combat for the most part is fun when you're not under pressure, and everything isn't going haywire, which isn't that often. When you're in the air, it's simply shoot at anything in front of you. When you're engaging stronger dragons, you can also fly in close and go at it tooth and nail. You can deliever swipes of your claw, bites or as up close and personal blast of flame. You get health back when you take down dragons head on this way, so it's encouraged to do so, as the game can be rather punishing. You can also "takedown" dragons by entering QTEs that will have you jerking the SIXAXIS certain ways, along with button and stick inputs to take down a dragon with no muss, no fuss.
You can also take it to the enemy on the ground. Fly low the ground and press L2+R2 to land, and you'll be on foot. You can shoot fireballs, or spew a continous stream of flame. You can melee the troops, and sometimes the action will slow down to dramatize the event of a group of enemies being chucked into the air. You can also eat enemies to gain a little health back. After you've lit up a warbeast enough, you can also fly in close and tie its legs up, like you used to do with AT-ATs in Factor 5's Star Wars games.
One of the biggest problems of Lair is its inconsistency in difficulty. Some missions will be a breeze, where you can take down enemies or complete objectives at your leisure, but a few missions are mind-numbingly frustrating because there is absolutely no leeway for error. For instance, one mission will have you defending your mantas and taking out enemy ships as they assault a bridge at the same time, and you HAVE to find the exact balance of fighting both sides. No matter how well you perform in one area, the mission will be an instant fail if you neglect the other area even a bit.
Another level will even have hidden criteria that will cause you to fail, even though it looks like you're well past being successful. Some levels are rather short, while other missions can be rather long. On the longer missions, you'll have so many hard objectives to meet, and if you fail or run out of lives, it starts you over from the very beginning. In difficult times like these, it's a cardinal sin not to include check points. Had Factor 5 included a steady use of check points, the game wouldn't have been so frustratingly difficult at times.
Graphically, the game is quite impressive. One thing's for sure: more time was put into production values than gameplay. The dragons are rendered and animate well, the explosions are chock full of firey effects and debris, and the water effects are decent. The frame rate could have been a bit smoother, and sometimes the game tends to glitch and hang when you're battling it out upclose with a dragon, or tying up a warbeast. There is an overuse of solar reflections, though, which makes it a pain to get your display settings just right. Still, it's a very nice game to look at, unfortunately more fun to watch than play.
Audibly, it's just as impressive. Featuring THX, the sound is absolutely wonderful. The dragons sound scary and the explosions are exciting. The sounds of fire blazing and rock crumbling are terrific. The voice acting, though, isn't very good and pales in comparion to everything else. The music is well-composed, with an excellent soundtrack befitting of a multi-million dollar summer blockbuster. If you're going to play Lair at all, it's definitely worthy playing at a loud volume.
Oh, what a mess. What a shameful mess. Underneath the collective slop that is a poor control scheme (the updated analogue controls are only slightly better), horrendous targetting system, sickening camera and ridiculously inconsistent difficulty is actually a fun game. You really do feel how powerful, strong and deadly it is to be a dragon, and causing all sorts of damage can be viscerally satisfying. It's just so disheartening to have to put up with so many problems to really get at any good moments.
Sometimes when you have a diamond in the rough that takes too long to polish, it's just better if you cast the stone aside and look for something else. Too bad Factor 5 is shut down, because they might have learned from their mistakes in this game and produced a sequel that was more tweaked and refined to really produce a terrific dragon combat game. As it stands, this game just simply cannot be recommended, not even to die hard Factor 5 fans. In fact, those fans are the ones who should probably play it the least, because they'll only depress themselves by how far downhill Factor 5 went.