Twist and swivel and shake-shake-shake and hold some button while lining your soaring flame-throwing lizard up with some other luckless dude's, then stab your entire Playstation 3 controller left or right and pray the invisible timer clocking the little screaming fire-bombed guys you're trying to protect down below (or those other same-looking guys with the catapults you're supposed to be playing air soccer with) doesn't expire and jerk you out of the moment with a hey and a "whoops!" and a "try again" heidi-ho.
I've been playing Lair this morning, or trying to. It's a beautiful mess of a game with all kinds of great ideas tangled up with a whole bunch of bad ones. It's kind of sad, actually. I got to interact briefly with the game's director Julian Eggebrecht at GCDC last month, where he delivered a rousing well-received opening day keynote on censorship in games. Seemed like a nice guy. Articulate, serious, serious about the artistic aspects of his profession, and deadly serious (verging on defensive, but wouldn't you be if you'd actually created something?) about what he was trying to accomplish in Lair.
And that was? Beats me. I'm only five missions in, but I can't for the life of me figure out what this game wants to be. I'll keep playing and maybe it'll come to me eventually. But in the meantime, here's my initial info dump:
Pretty is as pretty does. In Lair's case there's plenty of pretty (the scenery) doing absolutely nothing, and plenty of nothing trying desperately to be pretty (the gameplay). It's like a gorgeous Alan Lee illustration tragically stuck under a piece of keyed up glass.
What have we learned from better designers about cutscenes? We don't like 'em, no sir we don't. Especially when they keep popping up after we've slogged through training levels and intro filler and we just want to fly and swoop and soar and play toss with cows and blow stuff up with our super-blazing-dragon-breath without someone jerking the camera and controls out of our hands every three or four minutes.
Lair's basic flight controls aren't half as bad as you've heard. Get over yourselves SIXAXIS or motion control or whatever haters, and stop griping that the game doesn't have an analog stick flight option. Yahoo's Alex Pullman says it's "like lumbering around on a semi with flat tires," which aside from being an inapt analogy reads like a completely different experience from the one I've been having. If the controls suck as bad as some are saying, then how come I'm skipping through Lair's canyons and valleys and mountains and bulwarked cities with gold medals? (No, it's not because I'm good or anything -- I generally suck at flying games.) Oh, and regarding the whole yank-back-to-do-a-180 move thing: It works 10 out of 10 times for me, and I use it all the time. Maybe my PS3 just likes me better or something.
But casual gamers (Eggebrecht told MTV GameFile they responded better to Lair's controls in focus groups) don't pay $600 for a game system! Fair enough. If you're perennially super-hardcore-grumpy about motion control because you hate moving any part of your body that's not your thumb or forefinger, then by all means, feel free to gripe away about how Lair's controls are so not CrimsonStarAceFoxCombatSkies.
Arrows make crappy radar reticules. Getting 360-degree radar right when you're doing 3D on a 2D surface is a pain, no doubt about it. But Lair's single blundering trippity-flippity arrow is virtually useless. It tells you where to go parallel to the ground, sure, but with targets like gnats in a cloud of dozens or more swarming up and down and all around, just forget it, okay? And that brings us to...
Targeting in this game sucks, and I mean intensely. Oh look, the arrow says to go over there. Okay, so I'm flapping. Flap-flap-flap. Now where's the thing I'm supposed to blow up...let's see...looks kind of the same with everything all dark and blotchy and--oh there it is! I think. It just turned white which means I can hold down L1 or R1 to lock on, except wait-wait-wait, that's not the right one, and besides, I want to take out this other one first. So how do you change targets? Beats me. As far as I can tell, the game picks whatever it thinks is closest based on where you're pointed. How forcibly helpful.
My kingdom for a timer... You know how Call of Duty does the thing with the screen turning progressively more red as you get hurt instead of a health bar to make you feel all in-the-game and stuff? Lair actually keeps the health thermometer, but thinks it's a great idea to hide the activity timer instead. You want to know how much time's left before you fail an objective? Guess! (No, really, guess.) Or keep a stopwatch handy and resign yourself to playing every mission at least twice.
And last but not least:
This stupid game was so hyped! I can't believe it! Screw you Factor 5 and Sony! Okay, the game's a mess, but get over yourself, media/community. Who hyped it? Companies need a conduit, and they're hardly using thumbscrews. Players: If you want to point fingers, point them at the guys running cover stories and "exclusive" whatevers and saturating the market with uncritical pap.
Yeah for real why did they hype it so much.
It like hyping paradise before an hurricane just to realize it persecution and hell.
Beside that thing look like a giant cockroaches, make one wonder is this supposed to a game of chasing blk roaches, "level one, the roaches answer they stay in the project because they owner feed unlike, the ivory kitchen where the eat them for praticing before some fear factor.
It just the way to avoid being the next native civilization where the kingdom is eat alive and wipe out. After all MTV have better gamefile for real "Brigette" can tell you. It better to jerk than 300$ /per Hr for a DonnaMatrix look a like Game.
Or a critical pop from the head of state, mohiba styles.
You really should play more than 5 missions before you start debunking claims people who have beaten the game (numerous times, in some cases) make.
That's why it's an info dump and not a review, Brendon.