Yager

"It's not bad, it's just not very good."

I keep searching for XBox games that will give me as much enjoyment as the Red Baron pc games have so based on a number of positive reviews I got Yager. It's a sci-fi airplane shooter, which isn't that common.

Your craft is something akin to a Harrier or a helicopter. It has two modes, jet and hover, and annoyingly the control sticks act differently depending on which mode you are in. In jet, left and right on the right stick rolls your craft while in hover it "sidesteps". In hover mode up and down on the right stick raises and lowers your elevation without changing your facing while in jet mode these directions do nothing. Why couldn't these controls have been combined - with left and right always rolling you onto your side and up and down always altering your elevation without changing your facing?

Your basic flight controls only come in two configurations, and these are just the button arrangements. You can invert the up/down controls but if you want the "pointing the plane like you're on one end of a pointer, the planes on the other, and the center pivots" feeling (which, by the way, is why down is up on airplane controls) forget it. Right is right and left is left only.

In fact the whole control scheme reminds me of the Descent games for the pc, which allowed movement in any direction regardless of facing. It seems like they wanted Descent meets Crimson Skies but overall I had more fun flying around and dogfighting in a Banshee in Halo and Halo 2 than I ever did while playing Yager.

So there's nothing really bad about this game. The graphics are nice and you'll spend time just checking out the neat vehicles and landscape but I don't see the point struggling with the unnecessarily awkward controls unless you already like this style of control. So I'd recommend this for fans of Descent or fans of that control style, but other than that I'd have to say save your money and go back and play the levels with Banshees in them in Halo and Halo 2 because those controls are done better and you'll have more fun.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/22/06