Lair (PS3)

The patient gamer often prospers, and a fairly good example of this comes in the form of Lair. On release, Lair relied on the PS3’s Sixaxis motion controls heavily, and while it did so in the hopes of making a more immersive experience out of flying a dragon into battle, it ultimately lead to an unintuitive and uncooperative control scheme. Later, a downloadable update was released to add more traditional controls to the game, but the motion controls still weren’t entirely stripped out of this control scheme. What this should have meant was that more players would be able to enjoy the game as the developers intended, but unfortunately the end product will be a bit underwhelming no matter which control type you play with.

Lair takes place in a medieval fantasy world where humanity once lived in idyllic peace until volcanoes suddenly sprang to life all across the world. Unable to explain this sudden occurrence and consumed by superstitious fervor over it, humanity was divided into two main groups: the culturally enlightened and religious Asylians, and the more primitive yet somehow more technologically advanced Mokai. You are Rohn, a dragon rider in service of Asylia when the Mokai launch an attack on your homeland, but the war isn’t as straightforward as it seems. The rise of a dangerous ideology is straining the relationship between these already hostile kingdoms and Rohn finds himself facing difficult moral decisions as the war continues and the truth is revealed. The path of the story and the moral questions Rohn faces are sort of straightforward and unexceptional, but the plot on the whole makes an excellent framework for the gameplay, the war and its complications throwing in all kinds of objectives and locales to test your ability to fight from the back of your dragon. The story and level layout are certainly woven together well and the world is fairly consistent and well designed, it’s just not an overly ambitious tale being told. Some creativity certainly shines in its creature design though, and while most dragons fall under basic categories like “wind”, “dark”, “ice”, and so on, the battles will also include things like enormous flying mantas that serve as bombers and troop transports and there are warbeasts with mounted catapults whose only real life analog seems to be Indricotheres. Coupled with some detailed city designs and unique settings, and it’s no surprise that this game’s visuals impressed upon release.

Unfortunately, all your time interacting with this world is spent on the back of a dragon, and it is very odd that I would have to prefix a statement like that with the word “unfortunately”. Whether or not you are using the Sixaxis controls, controlling your dragon never feels like it quite lives up to the expected thrill, partly due to the activities you engage in while riding it into battle. Whether it’s shooting down opponents with fireballs, wreaking havoc on soldiers while running across the ground, or getting in close to enemy dragons for a deadly duel in the sky, nothing quite feels all too involved or visceral. The bulk of your combat in Lair is spent locking onto enemies and shooting fireballs at them from afar, but this has a few complications. The sky is often filled with dragons from both sides and they are spread out so much that your fireballs often seem to do nothing because the game didn’t actually let them fly as far as the visuals seem to indicate. Most enemies are still best dispatched with this method as it keeps you out of harm’s way, but it’s not a very interesting form of combat and feels detached. You’re not really fighting something so much as throwing stones from afar and retreating if the enemy turns on you, although if you do want to get in close for a more intimate battle, you’ll see that no matter what control type you have, Sixaxis will be there to weigh things down.

Moving in to fight a dragon up close will start usually in one of two ways. If the enemy is nearly dead, you get a series of button prompts to kill them, although amidst the armor of the riders and the scales of the dragon it can be a bit hard to discern what is even occurring in these scripted takedowns. If they are able to take a hit though, you might enter pursuit, which is perhaps the worst part of the game despite being such a small piece of it. You and the other dragon are awkwardly moving about a confined bit of airspace, trying to fly next to each other so you can bump each other hard. This is already a fairly boring way to battle, but the bigger issue is, even with button and analog stick control, you must use motion controls to do the bumps. I’ve played many Wii games and have intimate knowledge of games adding weird motion control interactivity, but the Sixaxis isn’t as refined as the Wii remote. In games like Super Rub ‘a’ Dub, the Sixaxis shows that it can sense tilting and small jerks well enough, but Lair asks you to do all kinds of motions with it that seem outside the controller’s capabilities. To bump another dragon, you have to thrust your controller hard to the side, and the payoff is fairly minimal. These thrusts can come up in the scripted takedowns as well, meaning you can die instantly if the Sixaxis doesn’t think you put enough oomph in what almost boils down to using your controller for a mean hook punch.

If you avoided a bumper battle or cutscene takedown, you may instead get into an aerial fall with the opposing dragon. Here, it’s a matter of guarding when the enemy strikes and getting in your swipes and fire breath when they’re open. It can take a bit to figure out what works best, but it becomes fairly easy once you’ve learned the proper tactics. The dragons are bit jerky during this scene, making it hard to revel in your attacks when the dragons keep snapping into poses to match the most recent button press. This weak feedback for awesome attacks also comes into play with Lair’s last real variation on combat. Sometimes, you need to land your dragon on the ground and just go to town on soldiers to thin their ranks. At first, mowing down troops with your much more powerful beast seems thrilling, but lackluster animations bring it down a bit. Whether it’s a claw swipe, your fire breath, or some combo move that doesn’t really serve much of a purpose here or in the dragon duels, the attacks you use might as well be brushing against blades of grass for all the visual impact they have. Sure you might see some enemy bodies fly about, but there’s very little weight to your actions and the soldiers almost seem to ignore you unless you wait patiently for them to adjust to your presence. There aren’t even any enemies that can put up a fight on the ground, making it a place that is solely meant to make you feel powerful but doesn’t have the visual flair to back that up. Besides some flashy camera angles, it doesn’t really capture the glorious carnage that it seems to imagine you’re engaged in. The lack of impact to your attacks also carries into flying battles, where if not for health bars, you’d just be watching strong enemies take your attacks unflinchingly. Perhaps the worst case of this disconnect occurs when you rain fire down from above on the enemy army and see that despite seemingly blasting away tons of them, the game will inform you that you only killed four or so. There’s even a bite move you can use to eat a soldier that I often had to repeat over and over because I couldn’t tell if it worked due to the camera angles, although the camera is usually all over the place in general due to lock-on shenanigans and how many objects the game has to try and navigate your view around.

The last combat mechanic plays into the game’s ranking system for its levels. You get a score on how well you complete objectives and take down enemies, and if you use Rage Mode, time will slow down and your score will increase faster, your rage building gradually during the stage as you destroy things with your dragon. There are many different metrics you have to meet to get the higher medals, one of them usually playing into the game’s fairly good variety of mission objectives. While the action of Lair can be dull at times, the levels often have a fairly good set of goals to advance through. It can certainly get hectic or tense as they overlap or the effects of an earlier objective play into the more recent one, and the area variety often helps salvage ones that repeat or are otherwise fairly simple. Boss fights, trying to balance the strength of your army by making dents in the enemy forces, taking out powerful weapons and enemy encampments… Lair even throws in a dragon-riding stealth mission! Some are creative, some capture the push and pull of a warzone, and some just make for good arenas for standard battles, contextualization and variation helping to make up for some of the flaws in the controls and combat. It’s easier to swallow the generic fireball shooting when there’s pressure on you to do it quickly and pick your targets properly, and if you aren’t careful where you fly, the game will not pull its punches and will kill you in a second.

The objectives are good, but they’ve got a few hang-ups that mean they can’t completely redeem the control issues. The smaller problem is that introducing new objectives will always cut to a scene, interrupting the pace of the game. This can get really bad in missions where the screen will cut away to show you every manta you lose in a group of twenty your were supposed to protect, and the game will bring things to a halt to show every minor change in plan. There were certainly some objectives that didn’t need a visual cutaway to introduce themselves, but Lair does it every time with short but thankfully skippable cutscenes. The bigger issue though is… some of these objectives involve the Sixaxis. If you can get the hang of the motion controls for flight, they can certainly be good in their own way, but Lair wants you to shake the controller up and down over and over at times and the controller does not seem to be up for the task. Shaking the PS3 controller too hard legitimately makes it sound like you’re breaking it, and even doing as the game instructs you doesn’t always have the proper in-game effect. It took me a long time to learn that moving the controller up and down like a jackhammer, despite the game telling you to do that with an on-screen prompt, was not how you got the right results. After some experimentation, I learned that moving the controller in a wide circle in front of me like I was a window-washer got the best results, and these moments pop up far too often. Yanking armor off rhinos, pulling catapults off their mounts, tearing apart generators… some objectives that would have been fun additions only end up becoming battles with sloppy motion controls.

THE VERDICT: While it certainly feels important to lead with the problems with Lair, perhaps it’s more fair to the good parts of the game to not bury them beneath the issues. Lair has a well-realized world with great level structure and a good progression through quite an array of objectives. With tense moments and tight battle parameters, Lair could have been an exhilarating action game, but it fails to capture the might of your dragon or impact of your actions, and the controls only make things harder to enjoy. Every action you take is dull even if you are doing it for an interesting reason, whether it be mindlessly shooting fireballs, effortlessly sweeping up ground troops, getting in a predictable duel with other dragons, or worst of all, trying to make the motion controls do what you need of them. Despite the DLC to give you better controls, they still aren’t up to snuff, and the combat would still need to be improved even if the controls had been perfect.

And so, I give Lair for the PlayStation 3…

A BAD rating. Contextualization and proper direction for the action of Lair give it a good framework, but the execution lets all that work down. Lair chased innovation in many ways, its world and graphics impressing at the time, but the interactive side is let down by shallow mechanics and some annoying control choices. The immersive experience of riding on a dragon’s back just can’t be captured by the PS3 controller, and tilting your controller to move one around was never going to be enough when the action seems disconnected from the visual feedback. Even with a full conversion to buttons and control sticks, Lair would still need to make the act of controlling the dragon more involved by diversifying the combat instead of just hoping it is sustained by the level goals. It’s very much a case of the process of achieving a goal being less interesting than the goal itself. The complicating factors to make these missions thrilling are already present, just hindered by a design that doesn’t let the player engage them properly.

Lair had a lot going for it, and it could have possibly been something exceptional if it hadn’t sacrificed the core in search of innovation. All the thought and work put into the world, the visuals, the level structure… wasted in the pursuit of a control scheme that hampers play and necessitated generic combat that accommodated it.