PS3 Hands-On Preview: Lair

It's quite spectacular to watch thanks to the cinematic angles, but because you're not directly involved in the mechanics of the takedown, you do feel detached from the process.

There's so little in the demo that it's not simple to tell how well this attacking program will age, though it feels like it could grate quickly if the pacing of the game is off.

I was surprised to see how much of the demo was spent not in the air but fighting enemies on the ground. The second of the three sections of the demo mission involves holding back an approaching army on a bridge, which you do by burning them alive. Brutal, yes, but not much fun, because controlling your dragon on the ground with the tilt-controls feel unnatural and rough. You can also attack foes directly - in this case tearing apart bull-like creatures with your claws. The demo ended with another aerial dogfight, this time against tougher dragons, though still using the same method as before.

Apart from the controller, Sony is of course pushing the visuals of the PS3. Lair is pretty, but there's so much brown in what seems to be a limited palette that things to start to turn mushy after a while. The developers are hoping to get the final game running consistently at 1080p, something that not many games are doing right now because it's so taxing on the hardware. That's evident in the occasional slowdown and dropped frames of animation. There is, however, still plenty of time for Factor 5 to look at that.

With so little to go on, it's impossible to say how close the team has come to nailing the concept. The controls are novel and they work reasonably well (in the air at least), but there's nothing particularly exciting about anything. The most impressed I was during the short playtime of the demo was when I was watching the canned animations of the opponent dragon rider being killed. It's a pity you're not more involved in that slaying yourself.

Stay tuned for more on Lair as things develop.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo.com

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