LAIR

well, let me start off by saying that this game looks very nice. The musky colors of brown and grey make up the tone of the atmosphere for this game. It has a very medevil gritty tone to it. It feels like a dragon game with its seaside locals and moutainous terrain. The in-game visuals have some problems. There are in-game cutscenes that just look like a shitty ps2 game with the framerate messing up and the characters going through walls and what not. But when in the air the scope of the game is very nice letting you see from far away and making it blurry to show scope. When getting up close and personal with one of these beast you get to see very good detail on the dragons and their movements. they almost have like a boxing match between one another and its rather fun to see that happen, just one of the many in-game action scenes. The other part you get to play is ground combat with the dragon and tear up on soldiers and buildings and catapaults and what not. This has a decent framerate and of course the fire looks very good and sometimes you will get a slowdown to see yourself devour some enemies. In the game you pay as rohn one of the dragon riders you play through a war between two factions of course and so on and so fourth. The story is kind of bland and nothing that seemed to keep my interest. The story although may be cool just wasnt what made me wanna play this game. It was the visuals and the fact that im on a dragon. There are a few things lacking in the game that would help the gameplay. There is no radar at all so sometimes you cant tell if your going after a good or bad guy until the shoot or soemthing. Nothing to hard with that just something that seemed odd to be kept out but I do agree that it would sort of lose the realism of the game. They do throw in an arrow for objectives if you get turned around and what not which did help on some of the levels but didnt hinder my playing. Lastly lets get to the controls. All I can say is what the FUCK were they thinking when only saying six axis only! That was a huge mistake in my opinion. First off there is a deep learning curve because of that. Some of the moves do not respond the the way you want them to, I still am having trouble doing the 180 turnaround by flicking up the controller. The tutorial at the beggining is kind of shitty so you may find yourself playing through it once or twice just to get the fulll swing of things. The ground combat however supposrts the analog stick to move about and such which makes me wonder why not give me that option from the get go. That is the biggest thing pulling this game down is its frustration with the controls. This is worth a rental or picking up when it hits around 30 dollars or so. I picked up the rental today and im about 5 levels in and pretty happy with the game minus the controls. I see why the reviewers gave this game and average rating. Due to the lack of depth put into certain areas this game is pulled down to just another rouge squadron with terrible controls.


***/5 stars