We're nearly a year in to the PS3's hypothetical 10-year life-cycle and the console continues to look for a reason to exist. One of those reasons was supposed to be Lair, developed by Factor 5 of Rogue Squadron fame, and while it delivers some truly impressive visuals, it also delivers some of the worst gameplay in the history of videogames.

Lair casts you in the role of Rohn, a dragon jockey in the Asylian army. While elements of the story have been directly “borrowed” from Anne McCaffrey's classic fantasy series Dragonriders of Pern, there's enough here that's fresh to avoid any potential plagiarism suits. Everything seems just great at first as the initial story unfolds via impressive cut-scenes. Even the menu looks sweet and shows some polish and forethought. You'll find yourself all amped up, ready to hop on the back of a dragon and take to the skies, but this quickly gives way to gameplay horror that just gets more frustrating as time goes on.

Lair stands as a prime example of how not to shoehorn a control gimmick in to a game. In this case, the gimmick is Sixaxis, Sony's futile attempt to compensate for a lack of rumble. There's not a single game on the market that has benefited from Sixaxis and if Lair was intended to be a showcase for the scheme, well, it has failed miserably. Though, to be fair, Sixaxis isn't totally to blame for this debacle so much as the overall game design. Some may criticize the inability of your dragon to make tight turns and chalk that problem up to Sixaxis when the real culprit is the level design. Time and time again you'll come across areas that are extremely cramped, offering very little in the way of leeway, that demand precise controls and the ability to make a U-turn. Well, you can't do this, but it's not the fault of Sixaxis as much of terrible programming. It's as if the levels were designed with zero thought allocated to the flight limitations of a dragon and when the two get together it's a complete disaster. If flying in to invisible walls over and over again is your idea of fun, then Lair may be your game of the year.

Add to this the horrendous targeting system and you have all the ingredients you need for a truly awful game. With so much commotion going on, with so much reliance on precision, it is inexcusable that the player has no way to select a target for attack. You're stuck doing trial-and-error flybys that will inevitably find you concocting new curse words because you're burnt out on the F-word. How did this happen? Why was so much effort put in to stellar production values, from awesome graphics to superb sound, but gameplay received no attention whatsoever?

The sole highlight of Lair is the ability to “takedown” an enemy, wherein you fly close to an opposing dragon, slaughter the rider and kill the dragon, all presented in an effective cinematic style, but these moments are few and far between. As it stands, Lair is an exercise in futility, a poorly designed and frustrating experience that questions how loose of a definition we should give to the word “game”.