Some games aren't as bad as people say they are. In this case, Lair is much worse.

If you have any familiarity with Lair then you'll most likely know that, at launch, the dragons you control where steered almost entirely by the PS3 controller's Sixaxis sensor. Most reviews dated from the game's launch almost entirely focus on this. Even when the game got a Analog control patch, very few critics covered it and most modern Youtube videos still narrow in on the Sixaxis steering alone.

While in the spirit of fairness I played around with the Sixaxis steering for a bit, my findings weren't any different than other critics takes on it. It's over sensitive, or unresponsive, and makes the game borderline unplayable.

With that said. This review is written with the Analog patch applied and enabled. And is to show that even with "regular" controls. The game is still terrible to control and is simply a bad game overall.

Dealing with Lair's controls is a mentally taxing affair.

Unlike Factor 5's excellent rogue squadron series, your dragon is very slippery and loose. The acceleration in general will have you soaring past your targets constantly. Braking does not stop you on a dime like it did in RS.

One of the most bizarre design choices Lair has is the lack of a radar. Actually finding your objectives in the maps is incredibly annoying, and the acceleration of course does not help as when you do find out where you need to go or what to do, you'll be constantly fighting the controls to get a proper bead on your target.

There is a partial solution to this, the pause menu will sometimes will display your objectives locations. But most of the time, it will only display that objective and not update any new ones you acquire as the level goes on. Even completing the objective, as a whole or in parts, does not update the map so you'll still have those locations on your map through out the entirety of the mission.

The pause menu also gives no indication of where you are on the map. The game just expects you to pick a direction and hope to god you find the objective.

You would think Rogue Squadron but dragons would have fun combat. But that couldn't be further from the truth. The lack of a radar makes finding enemies a pain. And the lock on does not readjust your dragon for accurate firing. You'll often lock on to the wrong target, go careening into a wall, and have the camera freak out before the game recenters you.

There's no way to switch targets when locked. So you'll be constantly unlocking, braking, and crashing when in dog fights.

Occasionally, you'll have to take out enemy war beasts like Rhinos or elephant like creatures that resemble ATATs.

Locking onto Rhinos and Tauros will have the dragon instantly soar right towards them. God forbid you have any objects in the way. You'll be have the animation abruptly stop and you'll have the camera go berserk. Ending up a good distance away from your targets.

When you do reach your target. You'll have to shake the controller up and down to take down the beasts. This becomes very annoying in later missions as enemy armies will be sending Rhinos every 5 minutes.

Fighting the not ATAT creatures is similar to rogue squadron, but is no where near as fun or satisfying to takedown. You'll have to lock on to take down their turrets, which means you'll be sputtering and zooming in a circle and hoping the volley of arrows does not hit you. Then launching your harpoon and performing a dull, boring QTE to take them down.

Every once in a while you'll need to land and fight foot soldiers on the ground. Actually landing is a pain as it's the same button combo for braking. So you'll end up hovering for a good bit before actually landing.

When you do land. You'll experience the only competent gameplay Lair has to offer. Controlling your dragon on foot is relatively tight and mowing down hundreds of grunts is somewhat fun. Though mashing circle does get old quick. And in later missions the on foot sections drag on way more than they should.

The last element of combat is pilot takedowns. When locked on to an enemy ace, you can initiate a takedown by pressing triangle. You'll then be placed into a short minigame where you can slash, bite and flame the enemy pilot to death. Most of these takedowns can be won by mashing circle. And they lose their appeal quick.

You'll probably end up even end up hating them because enemy aces can initiate takedowns on you (often from off screen). Which can waste time and even cause you to fail missions as you'll be wasting your time fighting them off (you can't escape them).

Lair's mission design is plagued with escort centric gameplay. Protecting your vehicles is infuriating due to the lack of a radar and you'll almost always lose at least one of them before finishing a mission. Add the horrendous handling of your dragon and you have a recipe for a disaster.

When you aren't escorting vehicles and war beasts. You are either protecting a point or taking out turrets/generators (with one mission as an exception, which will be covered soon).

Taking out turrets/generators is similar to taking out rhinos, obnoxious controller shaking included. You'll often have to take out other smaller turrets before the main ones. Which leads to stumbling around buildings just trying to get your bearings while being pelted with arrows.

Protecting a point often combines all of the aforementioned objectives. Time is of the essence in these missions, but you'll be constantly interrupted by constant cutscenes. Whether it be one of your vehicles being destroyed. A new enemy showing up. Or a new objective. Flow is broken nonstop in these missions.

If the game had a proper hud. New objectives could simply appear onscreen and absolve this issue. Why a team as talented as Factor 5 never considered this is bewildering to say the least.

Remember when I mentioned one mission that was an exception? That's only half right as the second half is taking out generators. As for the first half, it's stealth based. With the aforementioned terrible handling and controls. I'm sure you're picturing how bad this mission is. But it's exacerbated by the searchlights completely blinding you.

Well designed stealth doesn't completely blind the player if they happen to get caught. RS never had this problem in their stealth missions. So seeing Factor 5 drop the ball here is disappointing.

Lair contains four boss fights. And they are about as bad as you'd expect. When you do actually get a good bead on them, wear them down and the get to the QTE segments. You had better hope your sixaxis shakes work. Because failing them costs the entire sequence and a life. The worst offender is the first boss. Who has up to three of these prompts in a row.

Why the analog patch didn't alter these to simply be button presses is anyone's guess.

Lair's framerate is atrocious. Any instance of fire appearing on screen drops the framerate from the low teens to single digits (Ironic for a game where you control a dragon).Boss fights and heavy weather have the game running at the low 20s, leading to sluggish gameplay . This is exacerbated by the constant motion blur that also obscures targets as insult to injury.

Visually, Lair's graphical quality is all over the place.

While the Dragon and beast models, along with the structures. Look relatively good, with great textures like shiny-cracked scales and detailed stone work, and good looking water with competent physics, the rest of the levels look very poor.

Ground textures are a disgusting smears and are incredibly flat. The bloom is often so blinding you can barely see details in armor. The constant motion blur not only kills performance, but also makes the game looked smeared with vaseline in motion.

Most of the cutscenes are pre rendered and mocapped. But the game cuts down on these in the last third. Leading to embarrassingly bad stiff models in low detail talking in environments that are borderline untextured. It hits you like a truck when you see them and I couldn't help but laugh.

Lair's story has a solid premise. But does nothing interesting with it. The Contrast between the aristocratic Asyilians and the tribal Mokai is never explored beyond a supply dispute. As the game uses the twist that a power hungry theocrat is manipulating both factions in order to gain power and become a dictator.

The second he becomes a dictator however. Both factions have allied with each other and he's killed by simply pushing him out of a church tower. The game then ends and you're supposed to feel bad about the "horror of war" I guess.

To Lair's credit. The voice acting is quite good. Robin Atkin Downes and Crispin Freeman give out great performances despite the poor story telling and are the main highlight of the game.

Another highlight is the OST. You may not know who John Debney is. But if you're in your mid 20s-mid 30s, you'll have heard his scores before. He has a large eclectic resume that includes Passion of the Christ, Elf, the MCU Ironman movies etc.

The ost suits each mission greatly. The catchy main theme blares bombastically on the main menu and during the final mission. The Asylian themes sound like a great mix of industrial and classical. And the Mokai themes have an excellent tribal theming to them.

Lair is simply a bad game no matter which control option you choose.

Horrid controls and handling, messy visuals, and a terrible story create quite possibly one of the worst exclusives on the PS3. There is no incentive to ever play this. Even for a laugh. It just a terrible, irredeemable piece of shit that killed off one of the industries most talented studios.

3/10.

Fun. This is not a word you will be thinking during your playthrough of Lair. There isn’t a single redeeming value to putting yourself through the torture of Lair unless it’s for novelty or pure curiosity, like myself. I avoided this game like the plague during and after launch. It was quickly thrust into bargain bins just months after launch and no one gave it a second thought. The HD era of gaming was a rough start for most developers and this game put Factor 5 out of business. So what happened?


Well, for Factor 5’s history you can watch plenty of YouTube videos on that, but Lair seems to start out okay, but within 10 minutes you realize you’re going to be in for a rough ride. The game seems okay during the opening pre-rendered cinematic as it looks quite impressive for the time. Once the cut scene ends you are on the ground and you immediately notice the first few issues before you even jump onto your dragon. The framerate. It’s absolutely abysmal and one of the main reasons why the game is nearly unplayable. It never runs above 30FPS and quite often dips down into single digits. Whenever there’s an explosion or the thousands of enemies rendered on-screen in forms of armies far below you, the game just can not keep up. The game from this point already feels half made and like it’s in alpha stage.

The second thing you will notice is how incredibly ugly the game is, even for its time. The textures are horrendously blurry and pixelated and stretched out, the models seem half-done, the animations are broken and skip and jump around to different points, and not to mention the awful controls. The dragon itself controls half-way decent, but without the patch to add analog support this game can not use the precision of the SixAxis motion with this horrible framerate. Nothing feels finely tuned and you’re always doing large gross movements to overcompensate for the framerate. When you finally get the hang of the controls you are to lock on to enemies and shoot then down with fireballs. Pressing circle allows you to magically zoom up to them, or just magically appear next to them for a takedown style button pressing fighting mini-game for health or a QTE animated takedown. You can also bash them on their side by swinging the controller towards them. This entire combat setup seems good on paper but it’s clearly unfinished.


Locking on doesn’t work half of the time as the dragon will stay locked on, face the opposite way of the enemy, yet somehow still shoot fireballs at them and sometimes make it. Usually when you let go of the lock-on button that’s when all hell breaks loose. Nine times out of ten you will slingshot across the map and disorient yourself, hitting objects also slingshots you as well and will just push you straight into the ground. Every single mission is either an escort or takes out X enemies until something happens. The objectives are so vague and it’s so difficult to know who is the enemy and what units to attack. There are no highlighted areas, arrows, or anything to help you out. I restarted missions multiple times because I didn’t realize I was attacking the wrong side or completely missing an enemy that I didn’t see. While swooping down and attacking thousands of enemies at once seems impressive, and it should be, it’s not fun at all in this game. The draw distance is abysmal as animations run at 2 frames until you get right on top of them.


Oh, and the story? Forget it. Two warring factions for no apparent reason and then you switch sides halfway through. No lore, no goal, just a couple of armies fighting because they can. The enemy design is boring, the dragons are boring, and outside of fighting the controls and framerate, the game is just dull and uninteresting. Even if this game worked the underlying gameplay loop just isn’t fun. Sure, the maps look huge and there are tons of enemies on screen, but it’s a jumbled mess of confusion and throws the balancing way off.

Overall, Lair is just an awful game and shouldn’t be experienced by anyone. Unless you want to play an infamously bad PS3 game, just stay away. Thankfully the game is short-lived, but you couldn’t get Gold ratings in missions even if you wanted as the framerate and awful controls prevent you from doing it. There is also no trophy support patched in which is a real bummer.

As someone who only played games casually back in the early PS3 days, I never truly understood how badly this game was received back in the day. When I (somewhat) recently heard that the game got an update that added analog controls, I immediately bought an used copy and give it a try. I thought that most of the game's problems would be solved by that patch, and I would have a fun time being a badass dragon rider. Turns out, there's much more dust and dirt beneath the frame.

Before we continue, I want to say that I didn't finish the game. I have reached a bit past the halfway point, and couldn't muster the energy to keep playing it.

First off, I thought that the story and lore of the world was pretty engaging. Long lasting grudges, religious undertones, betrayals; this game has it all. It's a decent fantasy world, and it was one of the things that kept me going.

The problem is, of course, regarding the gameplay. The game's performance is simply abysmal, with screen tears and framerate drops being a normal part of the experience. Controlling the dragon can feel quite satisfying at times, but also downright infuriating as it refuses to exactly behave as you wanted. There's also these mini QTE sections where you can face off directly against an enemy dragon, and the camera will lock in to show both of you flying side by side, trying to hit one another directly. These sections are still controlled by the motion sensor, so it will inevitably cause problems.

There's also a difficulty problem, where some levels are much harder than the other ones. It's not even the good kind of difficulty (challenging enemies or bosses, etc), it's mostly because the objectives are obtuse and the game doesn't tell you exactly what needs to be done. This is worsened by the horrible controls.

Still, there are a few good parts in this game. The soundtrack is very underrated, and I would recommend you to listen to it on your own. There's also a couple missions that are just so close to becoming great, but held back by the game's problems. There's this one level early on, where you attack a huge mountain fortress. This level nails the atmosphere of a huge battle in the middle of a thunderous storm, and it is one of few times in this game where I was just having fun without being frustrated at something.

At its best, this game simply makes me sad, because the game itself hinted at how good it would have been if the game didn't have so many fatal flaws. At its worst, it is a strong fuel for anger, the kind that is simply unhealthy for the human body.