Working once again for the Proteus Corporation (who flatly refused to pay you any compensation for the loss of your old ship) Your new ship is called the Sagittarius, and whilst it may look like a cross between a helicopter and a folding garden chair, it has its charms as it can fly like a plane and also hover like a helicopter. Missions involve anything from simple patrols to search and destroy or escort missions. Some jobs will see you dogfighting a variety of craft and then attacking ground targets, others will involve a stealthier approach where you might just be locating, identifying and marking targets for Proteus' larger ships and their huge stand off weapons. The landscapes are a varied bunch, but all have lots of contours and this is where the Sagittarius' hover mode comes in handy, using it to hide behind hills or for the sort of 'pop-up' attacks that any attack chopper game veteran will be familiar with.

   

Yager looks dreamy from the start, it has gorgeous, colourful and solid visuals with impressive amounts of detail. Objects scale with smoothness and can be flown right up to and examined - whilst the landscapes are a rather under-populated, there are a few non-hostile craft flying around and the occasional person or donkey can be spotted.

And you will fly around and have a look - Yager is that good looking a game that it demands exploration. Sadly you'll probably be nagged (via the far-too-frequent radio communications) to get on with your job, but you can fly around as long as you wish on most missions once the main objective has been completed. For some bewildering reason, Yager Development gave the Sagittarius a rather strange control system that lacks finesse and any sort of logic or instinctive feel. With much practice we managed to fly around without crashing into things, but it's more difficult that it need have been and the clumsy implementation means that Yager never feels as clever or controllable as some other air combat games. This might be understandable if your ship zoomed around the levels like a bat out of hell, but the pace of the game is rarely anything but sedate and the game gives you little impression of speed - even when close to the ground. I recently saw a documentary about the new F35 Strikefighter, and even in its prototype infancy it looked more controllable than the Sagittarius (and a heck of a lot faster too), so Magnus' heap of junk just won't do if you're looking for precision flying and excitement.

   

The weapons are also terribly disappointing, with wimpy sounds and visual effects, they never seem to cause the enemy a satisfying or reasonable amount of damage and you never get enough ammo for the better ones (you even have to search for it and pick it up yourself for goodness sake). The inconsistent lock-on targeting and the way that you run out of sky to fight in (due to a deceptively and disappointingly small flight area) will also become infuriating.

So, with its lovely graphics (the skies, landscapes, water, huge, detailed ships and superb flames and explosions all look wonderful) Yager is a graphical showcase. Sadly, the entire game is constantly polluted by stupid controls and a main character (Magnus) that will end up getting on your nerves. Yager's probably worth a rent, just because it's the only game of its type on Xbox, and so you can have a look at the pretty explosions. Disappointing.