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Even though this game has some good qualities, the gameplay is just too damned frustrating for it to achieve much.
First the good points. The game looks great. The music is also good. The story is good, though predictable. The game also handles changing scale well. That is, you can be flying around high in the skies and see great distances, then fly all the way down to the ground and land, and everything is equally impressive down to the troops around you, foliage, etc...
Now the not-so-good points. First and foremost, it seems to me like they tried to make the experience very cinematic and the controls intuitive. They eliminated overly game-like controls and HUD elements to strip the experience to the core fun: flying dragons is cool. This approach leads to the majority of the problems.
The cinematic influence requires that they frequently take control away from the player to show some event or action in the battle. On numerous occasions I could be heard screaming at my TV for the game to stop taking control away from me!
Number one game mechanic failure: targeting. The inability to choose your target makes it nearly impossible to really get into a groove during combat. You are constantly fighting the game to target the right enemy or object.
I see a disconnect between the functional implementation of the game and the goals designed into combat. Why, in a huge, epic battle, am I always trying to go after one tiny little thing somewhere? I am in a big fight and my only goal in life is to take out a single tiny rhino running around on the ground. The engine provides huge landscapes and massive scales of combat and yet, in the face of this, I am trying to find (and target) one meaningless critter on the ground. Not so fun.
Timed missions with specific story goals and endless spawns are fine, sometimes. Why is there not one single mission where the goal is to win a battle? Not one. You can't make a fight that is simply a win/lose proposition? Me and my burners vs. X waves of Y dragons, some ground forces and maybe a couple ships. What happened to the straight up ass-kicking fight?
In the end, Lair tries to be a cool game. I wanted it to be a cool game. I played through the entire thing twice, hoping to find it more enjoyable the second time since I knew how to deal with the mechanics with fewer failures. No luck, it was equally frustrating.
The bottom line: Lair wants to be fun but ends up frustrating instead.
PS: a point about the extras. The videos are solid and the concept art that I could unlock was very nice. The commentary, though, was trash. Note to Factor 5: play any recent Valve game. That is how you do commentary. Specific, interesting points on design, tech, production, or art. A 20 minute free-form rambling session over a 2 minute mission is ridiculous.
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