Dragons rock. They’re often portrayed as stupid (Reign Of Fire), comical (The Sword In The Stone), or mighty mythical beasts of supreme intellect and awesome powers, venerated by in-game characters (take your pick of almost any role-playing game). Whatever colour popular fantasy paints them, when a dragon gets pissed off with you it’s time to pay it the appropriate respect by legging it in the opposite direction, as you would flee any flying, clawing, biting, fire-breathing monster 50 times your size. With respect comes admiration. We’d like to be a dragon, or failing that, we’d like to have our own pet dragon to mount like a horse, flying and toasting our enemies at will. Atreyu’s ride on Falkor the Luckdragon is one of the reasons why we still enjoy The Neverending Story so much, charming Limahl theme tune aside. The dragon ride was also the reason we were looking forward to playing Lair.

Initially, Factor 5 seems an unusual choice of developer for such a high-profile game, if you consider its history. It’s been around for 20 years now but has been primarily focused on Nintendo titles, its last release being Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike for the GameCube in 2003, which was generally well-received. It’s probably this sci-fiflight-sim trilogy that qualified it for the job in the first place, and arguably Lair’s spot in the limelight is due to a thin post-launch catalogue of PS3 games. At a glance, it looked to us as if Factor 5 had done a sterling job with Lair, with its huge animated mythological creatures and the sprawling vistas that we’re becoming used to on the PS3. Maybe we wanted to see the PS3’s worryingly lean essential purchase list fatten up so much that we were willing to overlook our instincts and trust in everything we saw. But it’s easy to be deceived by a few choice scenes and screenshots, because Lair is not the epic dragon-riding fantasy we had hoped for.

It did get off to a pretty decent start, though. It’s set in a land split into two factions: the Mokai and the Asylians. While you enjoy life in the verdant and relatively affluent Asylian side of the divide, the Mokai make frequent assaults on the Asylian front from their arid and infertile lands. Both factions employ accomplished dragon riders in their armies and the game begins with a surprise attack from the Mokai. It’s difficult to sift an original plot from a saturated fantasy genre, especially when the majority of your budget is tied up elsewhere, but Factor 5 has done a respectable job of telling Lair’s story via the seamless cut-scenes and narration between each mission, despite the shallow characterisation. After the lengthy and engrossing introduction, five minutes on a training mission highlighting the functions of what seemed to be a surprisingly responsive Sixaxis control system was enough to hook us. It took quite a nose dive after that, though.

It seems very straightforward at first. Tilt the pad to the left or right to bank, up to ascend and down to dive, which is easy-peasy when you’re soaring through clear skies and attempting to fly through stationary hoops. However, it’s quite a different story when you’re engaging in aerial combat with a host of 40-ton monsters, while trying to navigate the turrets of a citadel at the same time. A few levels into the game and Lair’s controls quickly proved to be an enormous and very irritating lance in this particular dragon’s side.

For the sake of realism, Factor 5 has an obstruction detection system in place that causes your dragon to shift rapidly to one side should you get within close proximity of any building or fixed obstacle. You have no control over the direction of this movement and the AI seems to move your mount in the shortest distance that clears you from the obstruction. This might not have been a problem if your mount was easier to handle; if it didn’t rock gently forwards, while you were trying to hover or make a sudden dive in the heat of battle, after an accidental shake of the controller. But it’s hard enough to accurately guide your dragon through the scenery while gliding, let alone while sweeping in on a potential target. Fantasy geeks might argue that our difficulties with the controls are an innate and accurate problem with flying a dragon mount. This is fair enough for Rohn, our virtual protagonist, who’s taking the pros of an exhilarating, open-air adrenaline rush on the back of a flying lizard, with the cons of possible death or serious injury. However, we want to enjoy this game without the excruciating urge to push the Sixaxis controller through the TV screen! Ultimately, it seems unfair to criticise Lair for many of these faults that are inherent in the PS3’s signature controller technology, but Factor 5 could easily have ditched Sixaxis control altogether and relied on the tried and trusty analogue sticks. Perhaps even better, if they’d applied some fine tuning to your mount’s flight it could have saved many of our frustrations. Unfortunately, these frustrations didn’t end there.

As if the control system didn’t make handling a raging dragon enough of a chore, the automatic camera angles almost kill any notion of guiding your mount in the desired direction. Again, it’s not a problem when flying unfettered by the need to soar between obstacles to your next objective or attack a foe, but when the heat is on, the chances of you becoming completely disorientated rocket skywards. By pressing either shoulder button you can target and cycle through your nearest enemies, before blasting them with a fireball, or engaging them in melee combat by swooping in with Triangle. But as the camera pans to follow your target, any sharp change in trajectory by either party often means that you’re suddenly left blind as to where you’re headed. Either you release the lock-on and lose your target or ineffectually fumble with the highly sensitive Sixaxis functions in an attempt to turn your mount to face in the right direction. And when we decided to play it safe and ignore the lock-on button as much as we possibly could, we found that in a sky that’s almost black with flying reptiles, we couldn’t tell friend from foe, even with help from Rage mode’s bullet-time effect. Aerial combat quickly proved to be a thinly disguised and broken mess that unravelled with each level we played.

Lair is by no means bereft of redeeming features, however. Ironically, once you’ve grounded your dragon by swooping low and tapping both of the trigger buttons, it becomes much easier to control and a far more pleasurable experience. Many of Lair’s objectives involve killing a number of specific foes while engaging in a few combat scenarios. Fire blast enemies out of the sky, attack winged enemies in melee combat and strafe grounded foes with flames. Best of all, you will also get to land and confront hundreds of enemy troops head on… and it’s an absolute massacre. A beautiful, visually satisfying bloodbath. Exactly what you would expect if you unleashed a rabid sky terrier into a swarming rat’s nest. The foot soldiers may outnumber you by hundreds or sometimes thousands to one, but you have an enormous size advantage and some mighty powerful weapons at your disposal. Your fireball and flame attacks alone will take out dozens of enemy troops at a time, but should the enemy get too close, a tail swipe will fend them off. Alternatively, you can simply tell your mount it’s chow time and allow it to feed until you break the advancing enemy’s morale and they begin to flee. It’s not much of a challenge early on, but it easily became one of our most anticipated objectives.

To be fair, the Sixaxis might be the main perpetrator of Lair’s problems, but it’s not the only one. Factor 5 has tried to cram facets of several genres into a game that appears to be only one, including puzzle-solving adventure elements. You’re often expected to know what to do next without being given any clear idea of how to do it, and Lair’s fourth level highlighted this confusion. Having fended off dragon attacks and hammered out a few fireballs of our own, we were instructed to enter a temple and destroy the mechanism inside, which we wrongly assumed would mean a few dumb swipes at an appropriately conspicuous point, and not the specific technique we had to employ on three separate devices. This wasn’t an isolated case of genre muddling, either.

At a rudimentary level, Lair works incredibly well. More than that, it has the fundamentals of a game we’ve been waiting for since before Factor 5 had even thought of it. Others have even tried the dragon-ride experience and have failed abysmally, but beneath the enormous foul-up that is the control system, there’s a thoroughly playable game trying to assert itself. It’s as if Factor 5 has brought its experience with the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron series and tried to apply a dragon skin to a Rebel X-Wing, only the subtle mechanics of dragon flight have not survived the translation. Lair frequently dazzles you as an observer, both from an aesthetic and a gameplay perspective. However, it’s only once you actually have the controller in your hands that you realise what a frustrating experience it often is. Not just for the lack of control, not even for the disappointment at how much of a letdown it is, but the dismay at yet another potential PS3 hit that almost was.

Ben Biggs