You've lost your ship, your job, all your money and even your girl! Welcome to the life of Magnus Tide, Freelancer. At the start of Yager, Magnus has just begun to put his life back in order, a nice new ship and a job that looks like it will pay pretty well. The unfortunate side of it all is that his good fortune seems to be riding on the back of a war. To make matters worse, upon the start of the new job it's his ex girlfriend Sarah that pops up over the communication link giving him his orders!

Will life get better for Magnus or worse?

One of the first things that strikes you when you first load up Yager is that it looks damn beautiful. A special mention must be made to German developers as they really seem to have their heads around coding for the Xbox. Recently we had the landscapes in World Racing and now Yager. They truly look amazing, the view distance goes on for ages and there are so many nice graphical touches that you sometimes just find yourself flying around to take it all in.

Your laser bursts reflect in the water as they travel over it, the landscape is dotted with incredible little details such as futuristic wind power generators, buildings, trees and repair pads. Enemy ships explode into satisfyingly chunky pieces that crash to the ground and even create nice heavy looking splashes if it happens over water. In the cockpit view as your ship takes damage you will see cracks and marks appear all over your cockpit window. Loads and loads of great little touches, as they say, it's the little things that count!

Everything from the buildings, ships (good and evil) and weapon effects just look amazing. Your own ship, the ‘Sagittarius' is very detailed and smoothly animated during transition between its hover and flight modes. A great feature is that if you do well during the game you can unlock 3d models of the games vehicles to look at. You can rotate them around, zoom in and run through their animations. Up close you can really see that Yager had some truly excellent artists working on it.

With all this graphical goodness going on it's a shame that the controls in the game kind of let it down, not to a large degree, but there are a few legitimate complaints that must be raised.

Yager is not a flight simulator. The developers have aimed at simple controls and in that respect they certainly succeeded as you can freely switch between hover and forward flight modes simply by clicking down on the right analog stick. By default pulling back in flight mode will make you climb altitude, but that's where anything in common with normal aircraft ends. Switching between forward flight and hover mode is a great feature as there are weapon pickups and speed boosts around the levels that you can collect. It also lets you land for repairs quickly and takes all that ‘learning to fly' stuff and throws it out the window. If you've played any arcade flight shooters you will pick up the controls in minutes.

While the controls are easy to pick up, they do unfortunately feel fiddly and I found myself still selecting the wrong weapons even though they are represented by icons on your HUD and also by your gun sight icon changing shape. Quite often I found myself wasting precious rail gun ammo when I meant to switch past it to my lasers or machine guns. The hover mode also works as a nifty air brake in dogfights as well but the controls just feel a little bit ‘loose' or ‘floaty' and it can be tricky to line up a lot of the targets. You don't ever feel like you have no control, just that you are never 100% in control of your ship.

The main story stretches out through over 20 levels and the characters you interact with really feature some good voice acting. Magnus himself is handled very well and never becomes annoying. During dogfights he'll drop in a nice one liner that will always raise a smile on your face. He's got attitude without being immature sounding which is great as he's not some kid, he's mature (well that could be debated) and experienced and it really shows through due to the quality of the voice actor that plays him. The plot is good too and you can tell that a lot of thought really went into both that and things such as the voice acting. Sure, some characters sound a bit silly with crazy English accents, but nothing ever sounds really out of place.

The difficulty of each new level rises as you progress and introduces you to new threats at a nice pace, and while there is no difficulty option in Yager, most people won't be forced to replay too many levels to complete them. If you listen to your orders and follow them you won't have too much trouble completing all the missions in a few days.

And that's the worst thing about Yager. Once you complete it, and it will only take a few days, is that afterwards there is not a great deal to bring you back for more. Sure, you can replay all the missions again to get perfect ratings, but there is no multiplayer mode at all, no random mission generator or not even a free flight mode to zoom around the great looking levels to see what you can find. With the controls the way they are though, dogfighting against a friend may have even highlighted their flaws even more..