We know the Humans, never given up living in peace and harmony, always need to put themselves on the face for a yes and for a no. In our world as in that of Lair, a kind of alternative Middle Ages, it's the same thing. Except that there, they have strong allies to fight: dragons. You play as a knight or rather a dragon rider, Rohn, fighting for the victory of his side. If sometimes you control it directly, it is often only time to join your mount, and there begins the real gameplay of Lair, based on the control of the dragon at Sixaxis. By leaning the joystick, we therefore direct our mount, which we can then accelerate, brake, spit fire or fight with the various buttons. The first contact is quite disturbing, because we have to forget our habits (and therefore avoid handling the analog stick which only controls the camera). Unlike a Wiimote whose shape immediately puts in mind "I move my wrist", the Sixaxis keeps an appearance of Dual Shock, so it is a little more difficult to get rid of reflexes than we have acquired for years! Despite everything, in less than an hour, you become familiar with this new system. The idea of directing your dragon in this way is interesting at first, but in practice, it is already much less sympathetic. Because what you may gain in immersion, you lose in precision: it's not easy to keep the enemy in line of sight in full flight! And if a shake of the pad allows you to make a 180° turn, it sometimes feels like you have to insist for it to work. In fact, this system quickly turns out to be tiring, especially since in the middle of a fight, the camera sometimes has fun playing tricks on us. Grab an enemy to release it in the air, it points at it long enough to show you its fall, before coming back to you afterwards. It's not easy to navigate in these conditions!
Tralalala Lair
To this confusion of playability is added a confusion of action. The missions often consist of destroying targets: catapults, soldiers, fantastic creatures, elements of the decor... Only sometimes, the objectives are not very clear in the midst of dozens, even hundreds of units on the screen. Visually, the developers played the one-upmanship, and it is true that at the beginning, it impresses, like the fights of the Lord of the Rings. But you still have to know how to manage all this little world! In addition to the fact that we do not always identify well what we must attack (by pressing a button we can display our targets in red, but this is not very practical when we also have to move the pad and take care of attacks), the game engine does not seem to support so many elements to display very well, so that regularly, it is slow. So, even if visually, despite some weaknesses, it may seem quite tough, we are left with an impression of mediocrity. Pity ! Spitting fire is fun, but our dragon can do more than that! By locking an enemy, he can run over it. It is then a question of either pressing the various buttons to burn or scratch it, for example, or to get up to it by orienting the joystick then shaking it in its direction to hit it. We even have the right, from time to time, to small Quick Time Events (QTE), not very interesting by the way... But overall, the action is always vague, we have the disturbing feeling that chance has its say to say, and therefore to be somewhat excluded from the clashes, a shame!
All this is all the more frustrating as the universe created for the occasion is rather successful. Certainly, as we said, the engine is not technically impressive, but the game has a frankly catchy style. And the idea of taking part in a real war where dragons and other fantastic creatures replace tanks and planes had everything to hook us. Alas, for this to work, it would have required a game design to match. Not to mention that even if the gameplay had been successful, the presentation of the adventure divided into rated missions (to race for medals, if you are a little bit masochistic) seems to have been just as dispatched. The result of all this is the impression that the product has been botched. The base itself is not uninteresting, but everything is much too approximate to be captivating. As for the Sixaxis argument, maybe it would have been necessary to finally do without it or confine it to certain phases of the game, and instead offer a real playability that is certainly more classic, but more effective. What if, after all, we reconnected this good old Saturn to remake a good old Panzer Dragoon? Or at the limit, Drakengard on PlayStation 2. Like what power is not everything: we do not question the talent of Factor 5 (which, once again, had us amazed on GameCube), but perhaps have they just ran out of time? If this is the case, one wonders why to press them, it is not a known license, there was certainly no need to spoil a title that could certainly have claimed to be much better.
