But you won't get the "true Lair experience" so remember that...

The controls are slightly improved for 1.92 and almost every reviewer out there played it with inferior controls to what you're using.

Not that the controls were Lair's only problem but it did improve the game slightly.

Its just peoples opinions. To me it looks amazing. I can fight with the controls and find ways for me to improve with the game. If I had the money to buy a PS3 this would be the game I would buy.

Not sure what the point is here, I think reviews are reviews and opinions are opinions wether they are from a magazine or some user on a forum. You can use your own discrection wether you feel the reviewer was biased or not.

Collectively reviews can be read to see what people mutually like/dont like, overall this game scored lower than peoples expectations.

Its interesting, you can turn this around. How many people staunchly defend/rave about Lair that *havent* actually played it yet? Hmmm.

Personally I want to play this game, Im just waiting for the upstairs neighbor to pick it up.

I'm 100% honest about never having played the game, and I've yet to say anything to defend the game.  Is asking for honest opinions that absurd to you?  I just want people who have actually played the game, such as Rocket Pig or Leo-J, to relate how good or bad that experience was for them instead of hearing from people whose biases I cannot track.

The issue with reviewers is that they have their opinions, and I don't share them.  According to the reviewers three of the 10 best games of all time are FPS games and I don't even like those.  They also give games like Ys 6, PSU, and Koudelka scores as bad as Lair and I found all of those to be enjoyable. 

Whether it's a bias they are paid to have or not, every reviewer's opinion is just that:  their opinion.  If I don't know what assumptions they make when doing a review, how do I know the accuracy of that review?  There aren't any other games like it in the top 100 of gameranking's averaged review scores.  Not one flying game in the top 100?  Does that mean that the genre is bas or lacks any decent representatives, or does that mean that they genre is relatively niche and most reviewers don't care for it and therefore give lower scores?

As a group, reviewers have essentially stated that flight games aren't worth much merit.  There's not even a single flight sim with an average review score above 9.  I don't want their opinions on the matter.  I wanted people who played it with an open mind and still came to a given conclussion instead of someone who passes another's opinion off as fact.

Reviews are just opinions, yes, but they're opinions from somebody who knows the ins and outs of gaming to be sure. And you don't have to like every review or reviewer...I like IGN, but sometimes I don't completely agree...reviews are just nice to see why somebody did or didn't like a game.

And no, you may ask honest opinions about who's played Lair. But WEWdeadeye told you he played it, and what he thought of it, and then you bashed him, saying you didn't want a review. wtf? That's exactly what you were asking for...he played the game and did not like it, and you bash him for saying so? Pretty arrogant and confusing.

In your original post you wrote

"So, for the people who have actually played it: How good or bad is it really?"

Then you responded to WEWDeadeye with

"I don't need a review. I didn't ask for a review. I asked: Did you like it, do you normally like these kind of games, what were you expecting from this game, and how long did you play it? That's not a review. That's a survey."

WTF are you really asking for? Make up your mind.

Yes, they do know gaming. That's why I can believe a reviewer who says the controls are/were difficult without issue. I can believe them if they there's this mistake or that unfun gameplay. But at the end of the day, they are trying to represent their efforts as a measurement of how much fun a person will have with a game. They're bad at that. If they like FPS and not flight games and get stuck with Lair instead of being given Bioshock that's not going to leave them too happy. The types of games the review even likes does influence their reviews quite a bit.

And how is it bashing for me to tell him what I'm askign for when he couldn't understand it? It may not have been exceptionally polite, but he did exactly what I was trying to avoid. He told me he played it and didn't like it without giving any information about his expectations or the time he invested in it. For all I know he could have wanted to hate the game and played it for 30 seconds to confirm his pre-existing bias as I did with Motorstorm.

He provided no value because, as I said, he only said it was bad and gave no context to back it up. All he did was tell me what the reviewers thought. I can read the reviews on my own, it's not that hard. It's also not worth much if no one who reviewed the game likes flying dragons and never mentions that.

And that's what I'm trying to get around, here. If you don't like flying dragons at a conceptual level, I want to know that.

Chichiri, here is my friend's take on the game:

http://www.theancientgamer.com/index.php?/site/comments/review_lair_ps3/

Here's my "I HATE THIS F***ING GAME" rant:

http://www.theancientgamer.com/index.php?/site/comments/review_lair_followup_ps3/

There. You get both sides of the fence with that (one informative, one bitchy).

 You forgot all the conspiracy theories about how magazines dunno how to review Wii and DS games? And those games weren't stood up for but Nintendo games that got bad reviews (Wii Play and Mario Party) have been defended. Apparently the reviewers only know how to review Lair, not to mention many people predicted bad Metroid reviews because of biases or whatnot...