Review: Dragon’s Lair

Posted by Ben on January 22nd, 2011 | 1 Comment | Tags: Dragon's Lair

The next time I hear somebody wailing about the lack of interactivity in modern games, I’m going to direct their attention to Dragon’s Lair, a game with so little interactivity that it displayed the message “Do you want to quit watching the game” when I tried to end the torment. Dragon’s lair isn’t a game; it’s the equivalent of a DVD menu that restarts when you press the wrong direction. Taking “control” of hero Dirk the Daring, the man with the impossibly girly scream, you have to do the typical hero thing. Rescue a princess from a dragon, traversing huge gaps, swinging on burning ropes, and generally battling monsters of all shapes and sizes. Except you do none of these things.

When I say that you do nothing in this game, I mean that you press a button, and watch Dirk skip around, and act all heroic while you sit there with your eyes on the bottom left corner of the screen. Yep, Dragon’s lair places an image of the D-Pad in the bottom left corner of the screen, and it lights up accordingly, with the center of it lighting up meaning that you have to press X and not die. It’s tiresome, and the offshoot of this placement means that your eyes are constantly being drawn away from the animation, which is meant to be your reward in this game (watch for the moments when the animations switch from HD to SD. It makes the game at least 100% more fun). The game does have leaderboard support, but they only display the top 10 players, all of who are ranked 1, due to the fact that you can get a perfect score in the game, thus removing all hope of usefulness from the feature.

Dragon’s lair is barely a game, with no real gameplay to speak of, and isn’t worthy of your time in the slightest. The game isn’t fun, and I’m quite sure that if you find anything even remotely entertaining in this game, you deserve to be sectioned under the basis of being a crazy person. Don’t buy this game, just watch it on YouTube, and press the arrow keys on your keyboard every 5 seconds. You’ll have the same experience, and save money doing so.

For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation 3 version of the game.