Die Freelancer!
Magnus Tide has been having a pretty tough time lately. He crashed his plane, lost his job and his girlfriend left him. After a few months, Magnus managed to land himself a new ship, and a job as a freelancer for Proteus, one of several mega-corporations which now control the world. Unfortunately for Magnus, his new job couldn’t have come at a worse time, as the world is on the verge of war. To make matters worse, Proteus are treating Magnus like a rookie, forcing him to undertake basic training once again. Magnus must work his way back up through the ranks of Proteus, while helping the organisation maintain peace.
First Person Shooter In A Plane?
Yager Development’s method of simulating flight is rather unique. Magnus Tide’s ship, the Sagittarius is similar to a Harrier jet – it can switch into a hover mode at will. While in hover mode, the game takes on the feel of a first person shooter – left stick moving and right stick aiming. The other mode of the Sagittarius is the jet mode, which is fairly self explanatory. The game makes you switch between modes at will; jet mode is good for when you need to get somewhere in a hurry, or are forced into a dogfight, while hover mode is good for escort missions, stationary targets and sniping. Sometimes Magnus will be required to leave the Sagittarius and man a turret. If you’ve ever played Rage Software’s Incoming, you’ll be right at home.
Yager is heavily focused on story, and this will be apparent to you throughout the game. You’re constantly receiving messages from Proteus throughout your missions, as well as conversing with the other pilots on the battlefield. There are always cut scenes between missions where Magnus will reflect on the mission and talk about what he thinks is going on.
Yager’s missions are quite interesting, as you’ll start out doing one objective, and then some event will go off, and you’ll be required to do something completely different. While these events are scripted (and thus not allowing for much replay), they’re quite exciting when they happen for the first time. You’ll be required to do all the usual tasks synonymous with air combat – destroy this, protect this, escort that, but you’ll also have a few sneakier objectives to attend to, such as marking targets for air strikes, and picking off defenses with your rail cannon.
As with any game dependant on story, Yager is relatively short lived due to a relative lack of replayability. The main game will take a few days for any gamer to play through, but there’s nothing to come back for after it’s finished. Some deathmatch or co-operative modes, or a branching story could have extended the life of the game exponentially. The other major gripe with the game is the control. Controlling the Sagittarius can be very tricky to begin with, as the switching between controls for hover and jet modes may confuse you at first. The jet mode is also lacking in acceleration and braking controls, which can be annoying when you wish to slow down the speed the craft is travelling at. The final gripe is more of a personal one; any mission that requires stealth and/or sniping. Enemies spot you from a mile off, even though their radar isn’t supposed to detect you when you’re close to the ground. Sniping kill zones are relatively inconsistent; one shot in a zone may kill a target one time, but won’t kill him the next.
Shut Your Goddamn Mouth, Magnus!
From the outset, it is apparent that the main strength of Yager is in its visuals. The ships look excellent, boasting some special effects like bump mapping and reflective surfaces, and for the first time in ages, the explosions produced when a ship is destroyed actually look pretty cool. The environments look spectacular, filled with all sorts of neat little details such as wind power generators, buildings and bases. Landscapes are fully bump mapped, whether they be covered in grass, snow or dirt. Lighting effects from the various weapons are also noteworthy. There are also other little effects within the confines of your cockpit – the front windscreen of the Sagittarius is reflective, and when you are consistently blasted by the enemy, bullet holes and laser burns will appear in the glass. The characters look pretty good throughout the cutscenes, with an impressive level of detail present on the face and the body. The best part is that Yager manages to produce such nice visual effects all while running at a constantly smooth 60 frames per second.
Yager features a decent musical score to accompany the action; the pace and style changes whenever the action heats up. Sound effects are crisp, accurate, and just fairly cool in general, though some surround sound support could bolster things. Finally, the voice acting is a mixed bag as Magnus can be annoying at times, both in his dialog and the way it is presented. The other characters actors and dialog aren’t particularly brilliant either, though there have been much worse efforts over the years.
All Over, Red Rover
At the end of the day, Yager just isn’t anything particularly brilliant. There’s nothing terribly wrong with the game, it’s just a combination of a bunch of little things, like the length, lack of game modes, weird control and highly average voice acting which overshadow the good things such as the graphics. Yager is worth a purchase for those Xbox graphics whores or a rental for anyone who is looking for a good weekend game.
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