Let Sleeping Dragons Lie
Rogue Squadron + dragons! What could go wrong? Apparently, everything.
Published: September 4, 2007
In short, the game plays poorly independent of the motion controls, but they exacerbate what is already a fundamentally broken, confusing mess of a game. Case in point: the level where you have to fly into the enemy camp to take out their searchlights (a task that's meant to be a suicide mission and is made completely pointless with the following level).
At first, the controls are just fluid enough to make ducking and dodging searchlights (which look retarded, by the way), but as soon as you arrive at the segment where you have to latch onto one of the power bases and waggle the controller like a spaz in a candy store, only to be spotted by searchlights and have the entire screen go white while they're trained on you, all while dragons are shooting at you and cannon fire is incoming, it's enough to completely kill the experience. And it's like five levels into the game. Just thinking about that level makes me want to punt something.
But what of the much-vaunted visuals in the game? They do run at 1080p, after all, so surely they must stand up to close inspection at that resolution, surely the textures and the animations and the detail in the world must have been designed to be viewed at that resolution, right? Noope, the game looks like crap even in standard def (worse, in fact, because of the way the game's detail is crunched to make things look oddly muddy and sparkly at the same time).
It's not just the framerate (though that's a large part of it), it's that the world just doesn't seem to mesh with the man-made objects in it. What looks like fractally-generated terrain is pockmarked with towers and castle-like structures, and those have plenty of detail, but the actual ground textures just don't have the same pop as the surrounding architecture. The one area where the game does sport impressive graphical mojo is in the water, which is easily the best seen in any game; it ripples out with the shockwaves from explosions and undulates with whitecaps and foam near columns and shorelines. It really is incredibly pretty stuff, and deserves plenty of praise.
So too does the game's audio, which is presented in 7.1 surround and is THX certified. In short, if you have a high-end sound system, the PS3 doesn't just pump out some great audio for your receiver to chew through, it makes love to it. The snarls and roars of the dragons, as well as the limited voice acting do a great job, but it's the score, infused with middle-eastern themes and rich with brassy, throaty notes that actively pumps the back channels as much as it does the first, and the soundtrack in the game really is good enough to be sold on its own. In fact, it's safe to say that the audio is about the only part of the Lair experience that isn't tainted in some way.
Perhaps it's just a byproduct of being released alongside games that do nearly everything that Lair does better, but there really is no excusing just how much of a disappointment the game is. It's made even worse when flying planes with the motion control in Warhawk or watching the absolutely gorgeous real-time cutscenes with proper lip-synching and powerful, emotive performances in Heavenly Sword that continually knock Lair down a peg until eventually there's nothing left to recommend about the game. Nothing. Stay the hell away from this one, folks, it's a complete disaster, and will likely end up on most -- if not all -- worst-of lists of the year.
