Dragon’s aren’t much fun. At least, they aren’t much fun according to mythical stories of fire breathing giants, known only for their plight and destruction upon the different human civilizations of the middle ages. Lair, however, is different. Looking pleasing with stunning visuals and some clever uses of the Sixaxis controller, Lair sets the mark for the best dragon oriented game of all time and sets the mark for which some previous dragon games fell heavily under. So, get on your dragon and let’s take a ride together in the kingdom of Asylia.
In the distance, you see a beautiful cathedral dome as the camera zoomed closer until we come inside of the building. While a priestly figure gave a sermon of a kind, we were introduced to Rohn, Lair’s main character. Rohn is a dragon-riding knight serving the kingdom of Asylia, which falls under attack of the Mokai, and it’s up to you to save it.
As the scene cuts, you are now riding above the harrowing winds, looking down on the battlefield. As you smell ash and smoke coming from the residue of fire from another dragon, the first order of business becomes to get used to the controls. To flap the wings–and fly forward–you tap the X button, and steering is controlled by tilting the Sixaxis, and one thing to note is the sticks are used for camera control. To shoot flames at enemies, you tap the square button. In the first level we were shown, we had to destroy the catapults firing from the Mokai ships that were attacking our main base.
For another main controller aspect, we were introduced to lock-on. By using L1 and L2, we were able to lock on to the formidable dragon and fly with it. While flying alongside, you can bash the controller to the side to bash into your locked target, but he can do the same to you…and worse. Luckily, if you die, there is no “continue game?” screen. It just continues and auto saves unless you switch off your PS3. A final results screen gave us a medal and ranking based on how many enemies we killed, how many friendlies were lost, and a number of other factors.
Suddenly, we were pitted into guarding a castle against giant manta—stingray-like creatures. You attack them and go in for a fierce landing into the oncoming enemies in the battleground. To show them whose boss, you can eat them with triangle. To give them a punch of their life, hit circle to bash the ground they are standing on.
It’s hard to keep focus on Lair’s gameplay, just like Ratchet and Clank: TOD, because Lair is simply breathtaking in visuals. The draw distance is stupendous, and the enormous maps are rendered down to the last detail thanks to texture streaming. The dynamic texture meshing, aside from linear texture meshing, is a feat only possible on the PlayStation 3 console and no other. Thanks to the sheer power of the SPU’s, L.A.I.R. is the first game to use dynamic texture streaming. On a more perfect note, Lair pulled it all off without a single hiccup in frame rate, making for plenty of smooth flight. And as you can imagine for a game featuring so much fire, the effects of everything from particle to fire, were some of the best we’ve seen from any game before, and any game soon to come aside from KillZone 2. PSU will have a full review of LAIR this coming August.