One of Lair’s biggest criticisms was that it’s motion controls were compulsory. The rumour of a patch adding analog stick control caused a sigh of relief among Playstation 3 gamers.

Now one fellow has claimed that he’s experienced the patch at GDC and that it will be released in the coming months.

Perhaps regrettably on their part, Factor 5 have swallowed their pride and patched the game’s controls. In truth the controls were the least of Lair’s troubles, but every little helps.

DugBuzz, an IGN Blogger, reports that the patch will be released in Q1 2008 and that it now plays so well that IGN should change their review score:

MEGATON!!! Lair patch coming in Q1 which adds choice of analog control.

I played it and Holy shit; Greg needs to give them a new score. It was kind of clear that Factor 5 put in the extra effort a little begrudgingly, but the results were amazing. This might push me over the edge into the “must buy PS3” territory.

I also mentioned Greg Miller’s name, and the Factor 5 guys burned a hole through my skull with their looks of hatred. I think they’ll be alright once the patch is out for a while though.

I doubt we’ll be this excited when the patch hits, but it will surely deserve our time, especially with such large environments and an award winning musical score by John Debney. We’ll still put this report in the rumours section, since “Dugs” reliability is at the moment unknown.

There was some incredible fuss over Lair – it’s like reviewers just loved to hate it, and it was the task of the next reviewer to out do the previous one. We’ve seen some similar behavior in Assassin’s Creed reviews, with it starting out as a 10/10 title, and then flying all the way down to 6/10. It was more extreme with Lair though.

Most of Lair’s problems appeared to be with the compulsory Sixaxis motion controls, and other niggling features that could have apparently been easily fixed. It all looked good with edible graphics and a musical score from the legend that is John Debney, but it fell at the final hurdle.

Perhaps its hype was its downfall. If no-one had heard of Lair before release, then maybe it would have faired better…and to be honest I’m quite a fan of motion controls in my games, with Warhawk giving me a little bit of flight control to my fingers.

Anyway, this is all vaporous, since the game is now on special offer at Amazon.com, priced at only $35. Some of the more pessimistic of you might think “Well that’s not a very special offer, I mean it is Lair.” But that is quite frankly rude! The game obviously needs our help and it can be played via remote play on your PSP without motion controls! Hurrah!

How couldn’t you buy it now? You could buy it for $35 and then either realise that it’s not actually that bad, or you could sell it on for little to no loss. What have you got to lose? Apart from precious hours of your time that is…

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.