I think the low scores given to Lair are indicative of problems within the gaming media, rather than with the game itself. Reviewers are clearly in a major rush to get their review online in a “timely” fashion, and unlike a majority of action games, Lair simply cannot be completed, let alone mastered in one sitting.

When the first review online issues a 5/10 score, there’s a good chance that others will follow - and once there’s a handful of bad reviews out there, and Penny Arcade have called someone a liar for giving the game a 9/10, other reviewers are downright scared to go against the hive mind.

Lair is brilliant, yet flawed, with soaring highs and frustrating lows - ultimately the result of Factor 5 trying to break the mold of yet-another-FPS-game, and perhaps being a little too confident in their baby, not cutting the uglier aspects of the game to concentrate on polishing the gems.

This could be explained by Sony’s decision to force a Teen rating on the game. In his keynote at GCDC, Factor 5 president Julian Eggebrecht openly discussed the ridiculous amount of time Factor 5 spent going back and forth with the ESRB, toning down the violence seen in the game to achieve the Teen rating that Sony wanted. Sony was presumably attempting to make the game more accessible in order to sell more units, a plan that ultimately backfired. Anyone at Sony who was actually looking at things realistically would have realized that Factor 5 spending this time on a final layer of polish for the game would have had a far greater positive impact on sales than the ability to sell the game to a younger audience.

Lair was so close to being the PlayStation 3 killer app, on the level of what Gears of War achieved for the Xbox 360 late last year - and for it to be near-universally bagged by the gaming press is a shame, as I’m sure countless people who would’ve liked the game despite the flaws have been turned away. If enough units aren’t sold to warrant the creation of a sequel, I’m going after you first, IGN.

Score: 78/100

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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.

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