Review: Dragon's Lair

Overview

Replay the classic arcade game from the palm of your hand. Ported to the iPhone with gorgeously enhanced animation and graphics you take control of the valiant knight, Dirk the Daring. Battle your way through massive worlds, crazy puzzles, and even fight a fire-breathing dragon as you attempt to rescue the beautiful Princess Daphne.

Features

This game relies on your quick reflexes to get past each obstacle. This is done by tapping the appropriate button at the correct time. Timing is everything here so you have a few options as far as how big or small you'd like the buttons to be displayed on the screen. There are also two different modes of gameplay as well, Home and the Arcade version. The home version is a replica of the laserdisc version of the game and it includes addition scenes.

Breakdown

The Good:

Just look at the screen shots here. Any guess what the "Good" will be? Okay, enough of that nonsense. Yes, the graphics in this game look amazing. The animation has been cleaned up significantly and it shows here.

The Bad:

The biggest flaw of this game has to be the controls. They really do not work very well at all. This game is all about timing and regardless of when you tap the buttons, you will ultimately find yourself replaying the same levels or obstacles over and over again. It seems the controls are just not an intuitive as they should be. You will swear you hit the button at the right moment, but the game will not recognize it at times. It gets very frustrating and you will most likely want to put the game down rather than replaying the same part over and over again.

The Verdict

Although the game looks great, it feels like that is all the devs really focused on with this one. This feels like a very rushed port of a classic game. Again, it looks great, but the gameplay and controls do not make this worth five dollars. I'd wait for either a price reduction, which EA always does, or a Free version first.