Lair

Often, however, you'll end up stuck with what are essentially mini-games to beat your foe depending on what direction you attacked from. Sometimes it's a rudimentary beat-em-up, as both dragons lunge at each other with their talons or shoot point blank jets of flame. There's an awkward delay between pressing a button and the attack animation, while graphically it's not even clear if the blows are landing. Regardless, health bars go down and eventually your enemy drops from the sky.

Worse are the times when you find yourself flying alongside an enemy, and must use the joypad to stay level with them while violent lurches to the left or right are used to ram them into submission. As with the 180 turn, it's a move that the controller struggles to consistently recognise and the combat feels random and intangible as a result. Finally, you may end up leaping from your dragon to clobber the enemy pilot yourself. In these instances, it's really just a glorified Quick Time Event, as you follow the on-screen cues to trigger the attack sequence. Fail to "move the left stick" in time and you magically reappear on your dragon and keep flying.

So, essentially, the dragon combat in a game that hinges on the core concept of dragon combat is an unappealing mixture of button mashing, button matching and imprecise joypad shaking. It's both tediously simplistic and needlessly fiddly at the same time. It is, as Kristan would surely say, an enormous faff. Fighting on the ground is even less edifying, a simplified version of melee games like Samurai Warriors in which you steer your dragon around like a tank (using the analogue stick for control, all of a sudden) in an attempt to destroy the required number of stiffly animated soldiers. Just landing is a chore, as sometimes your dragon simply hovers without touching down, and the camera flails like a fish once tethered to the ground.

Worse, the game funnels you into situations that seem to actively highlight the shortcomings of the game engine. An early mission requires you to assault a fortress by shooting out the spotlights, before flying inside to extinguish four signal fires. Not only is the camera horribly incapable of coping with the enclosed environment - often giving you glimpses inside solid objects or even the hollowed-out polygons of your dragon - but the objective itself reeks of lazy game design. The four signal fires have canopies hanging over them, which you must dislodge to snuff them out. You breathe fire on the ropes. Nothing. You swipe them with your claws. They don't even move and even pass through your body as you fly at them. Finally, you realise you can lock-on to these static objects and zoom in for the attack. Only then do they become tangible, and only then do your strikes have any effect. Once the canopy is dropped you're crudely blasted back outside and have to face down another wave of enemies, and blast another spotlight, before you can get back inside and tackle the next fire. It's fussy, nonsensical and old-fashioned "repeat the pattern" game design and this out-dated approach recurs again and again throughout the game during both regular combat and boss battles.

But at least Lair has its looks, right? It's a game you can use to show off your overdraft-busting flatscreen? Well, not quite. For a game that has been heralded as the poster child for the glory of the 1080p PS3 experience, Lair is pretty grisly once you look past the glittery exterior. The frame rate bounces up and down like Oprah's calorie intake, while the immediate wow factor of the graphics is shortlived. The sensation of flying above an epic battle is somewhat undermined when you notice that the soldiers are all standing in neat lines, all repeating the same frames of animation and using the same character models. The undulating water effects are beautiful up close, but from high in the sky the ocean becomes a patchwork of squares, all looping the same waves. Dry land has the opposite problem. Soaring near the clouds, the terrain below looks rich and detailed but when the game asks you to swoop down to earth, textures begin clumsily popping in as you stutter over them. Urk.

If the game were inspiring and absorbing in either narrative or gameplay then such technical hiccups would be unfortunate - Oblivion, for example, features plenty of egregious visual blemishes yet still sucks you in for the long haul - but Lair has precious little to offer beyond its initial short-lived "Ooh!" factor. There are just fourteen missions, and repetition soon becomes a problem. Protect these things! Destroy those! More enemy dragons are approaching! Everything comes in pre-determined waves, like Space Invaders without the lo-fi charm, while the gameplay is constantly interrupted for more cutscenes showing the arrival of new enemies or the destruction of scenery. Rather than being seamlessly woven into the action, these scenes are awkward intrusions full of juddering recycled animation. For all its free-roaming appearances, you're still hemmed into an invisible sphere, unable to travel too far from the battle in any direction. The whole experience, from bottom to top, is clunky and deeply disappointing.