Where I think Lair goes wrong is the sheer magnitude of different battle mechanics you’ll experience, each with their own different control method. While some of them are perfectly tweaked and work intuitively, some of them make you wish they’d never made the cut - and at times the game jumps between them almost schizophrenically, breaking the immersion of the core gameplay.

For the most part, you’re drastically outnumbered - and by the end of the game you will have experienced a couple of moments rivaling the movie 300 in their sheer impossibility. Of course, it comes down to you to turn the tide of the battle, time and time again. Part of the Lair experience is trying to keep your shit together and doing the business in the face of unimaginable odds.

It’s incredibly tense, and while you’ll often hear voiceovers letting you know what you should be doing, the battles become so expansive, and fought on so many fronts that you often need ignore the commands being barked at you, and come up with your own strategy to keep the enemy at bay. This can be counter-intuitive at first, but once you realize there’s a degree of freedom to tackle missions how you want, you’ll wonder why so many critics were quick to write the game off as a linear experience.

The game took me about eighteen hours to get through - which is pretty good considering the length of many recent AAA titles. Replayability is limited - coming in the form of medals awarded at the end of each level based on your performance. It’s worth going back to an earlier level at least once, to see how much you’ve improved, but with the flood of quality games being released for Christmas, it’s a particular kind of gamer who won’t stop until they’ve got the Platinum rating on each level.

Unfortunately no-one at Factor 5 realized how much co-operative play would have helped the title. It’s easy to get frustrated with Halo 3 when you’re playing on your own, but with a friend the experience becomes a lot easier and infinitely more enjoyable - even worth going back to - I can’t help but think Lair could have benefited in the same way.

Whether you’re playing on a standard-definition relic, or a brand new HDTV worth more than a Hyundai hatchback, Lair is a stunning game. Exquisitely detailed textures in a native resolution of 1080p give us downright nasty looking dragons, breathtaking medieval architecture, and water that would be top-notch had BioShock never been released. Unfortunately, Lair doesn’t manage to stay locked at 30 frames per second. It’s close, a majority of the time, but things do stutter when there’s enough action on screen.

Lair features an absolutely gut-wrenching musical score by John Debney that raises the bar for video game music from this point forward. Factor 5 clearly wanted Lair to be an epic experience, and Debney delivered - it’s a standout part of the experience even when the game is at it’s best.

Pages: 1 2 3

Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed.

This entry was posted by Tim Hanlon on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 1:56 am and is filed under Reviews, Playstation 3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Buy Online