“Crash and Burn”

As I begin playing LAIR for the first time on thing immediately pops into my head, “why the hell can’t I turn off the Six Axis?” I’m not a big fan of the six axis controllers, in fact I thought it wasn’t a good idea when they released it for the PS One, so having Factor 5 cram it down my throat wasn’t a pleasant experience. And if that wasn’t bad enough their controls sucked! It took me three tries to do a 180, after I had been playing it for an hour. I would assume if you’re going to make a game with only one control scheme you’d make it work.

Enough of that I can go on for an entire page about the controls, but I’d rather get into how the gameplay ticked me off. First the targeting system, you have soft lock (which means whatever enemy, object, whatever is closes to you at that time that you can destroy you lock on) and hard lock (you remain locked on to the target). That really isn’t that bad, until you take in consideration that you can’t select your targets. Here’s an example, I’m flying around trying to destroy a certain “target” right when a soft lock I go to hard lock on him and hard lock on a catapult, because my soft target switch to closes enemy which happened to be, umm let me guess…a catapult? You literally have to be right on the target to get a decent lock 70% of the time.

Let’s not forget the “special” killing moves you get to perform, as soon as I got the first “special” killing move, I thought, “Awesome this gonna be sweet,” then I pressed a button and done. LAME! A one button kill, you have to a five year old to get it wrong. Then there’s the dragon on dragon action! And it was gay as I made it sound. There was no notification beforehand that the game had a delay, so as I tried to shake the hell out of my controller to bash my enemy I nearly flung it out the window.

You play as Rohn a dragon knight, and you’re on one side of this great battle, then you get betrayed, then you make your way to the other side, find the other side really isn’t that bad and decide to fight with them against the side you were previously on (get it?). The story wasn’t half bad, I guess, I mean I’ve had better but in comparison to Factor 5 did to the controls and the gameplay, it could have been worst.

I would talk about the graphics, but why bother; no matter how great the graphics are, it does not make amends for the LAIR as a whole.

Tags: Factor-5, LAIR, Sony Computer Entertainment

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3 Comments » Lair Price Drops, A Lot | ripten on December 8, 2007 1:33 pm [...] reviewed L.A.I.R (that’s how the name looks on the box, though I don’t think the initials stand [...] Lair Controls Patch Experienced at GDC | ripten on February 21, 2008 5:38 pm [...] their pride and patched the game’s controls. In truth the controls were the least of Lair’s troubles, but every little [...] Prozac. on November 6, 2008 1:49 am Prozac…. Prozac…. RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL Comment Now Note: Commenting on Ripten does not currently require registration, however to be eligible for contests on the site, you must be a registered user. Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Commenting Rules: No hate speech allowed. If you must argue, please debate intelligently. Comments containing selected keywords or outbound links will be put into moderation to help prevent spam. Ripten reserves the right to delete comments and ban anyone who doesn't follow the rules. Thanks. Notify me of followup comments Tired of the Goomba? Upload your own custom comment avatar.