Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions (PC) (03/30/2005)

1. Editors' review
2. Users' opinions

Editors' review

• Editors' Choice: No
• Reviewed on: 03/04/2005

Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions is a PC version of last year's Yager, which was a middling-to-decent dogfighting game for the Xbox. Not surprisingly, Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions has a few advantages over its console cousin: The graphics are improved on the PC, and the game also benefits from the inclusion of a simple multiplayer mode. Unfortunately, this remix doesn't really add enough to the formula to justify another purchase for Yager fans; in fact, it's hard to understand why it was reissued at all, given the severely dated nature of the material.

Your protagonist in Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions is one Magnus Tide, a bed-headed ex-Marine who balances the chip on his shoulder with a carefully honed aura of insouciance. Tide lives in a future world where the nation-state has faded away entirely. This world has been divided up politically by large corporate entities that maintain their own military wings in order to wage war for territory, technology, and resources. It's helpful to consider Aerial Strike's narrative scope as a gigantic space opera--only conducted near the surface of the planet with myriad futuristic fighter jets, frigates, submarines, and other vehicles, in place of spaceships and UFOs. Tide is a scrappy mercenary pilot, known as a "freelancer," who contracts out his wits, assault jet, and itchy trigger finger to whichever corporation can write him the biggest check. The lucky company in this case is Proteus, which is akin to NATO and Vault City rolled up into a single, verdant island mass. As you learn in the game's opening sequences, Tide has been hired by Proteus before, to ill effect. In fact, a past mission failure under Proteus' employ destroyed the freelancer's reputation, as well as his ship. Aerial Strike's story arc represents Tide's last-ditch attempt to salvage his career--and to patch up his relationship with Sarah, a lovely but icy Proteus commandant.

In the brutal, turbulent world of Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions, you'll have to do more than root for the underdog to help Magnus Tide come out on top. Over the course of the game's 22 missions, Tide will gradually unravel the grand conspiracy that has let loose the dogs of war over Proteus' tropical shores. The plot's a little on the ludicrous side, jerking you from lush islands to Teutonic forests to Chernobyl-like industrial wastelands and back again with very little regard for logic or narrative continuity. This isn't a big problem, however, because you'll always know what to do when waves of Cockney-accented sky pirates or harsh pseudo-Imperial German fighter aces approach: blast them out of the sky using the Sagittarius, your state-of-the-art jetcraft. Your ship is a fantastic confection of JATO jets, turboprops, and weapons, and it is both extremely maneuverable and extremely deadly. It's capable of two flight modes. There's hover mode, which provides a slow, stable, helicopter-like feel for the purposes of stealth, careful maneuver, and wide-area weapons targeting. And then there's jet mode, which doubles your throttle and lets you perform dogfighting techniques like barrel rolls, flips, and sharp turns.

In order to make much progress in Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions, you must learn how to transition seamlessly from one mode to the other so that you can jet into a location, stop on a dime, start strafing, and then beat a hasty retreat. The standard controls for each mode are a little different, so gaining this level of mastery is no easy feat; however, learning how to fly using a PC keyboard is actually a little easier than on an Xbox controller, since the controls don't switch around so much. Also, the game does a great job of building your skills slowly through its mission structure. Some levels may frustrate you by requiring quantum leaps in your skill level, but when you finally get the Sagittarius to respond intuitively, your achievement will feel worth the trouble. Thankfully, the game simplifies matters with a liberal auto-aiming system, which functions in either flight mode. Provided you have an appropriate weapon selected, pointing your cursor near an enemy that is close enough to your ship will engage your targeting computer, which will then begin to follow the hostile. Furthermore, you can "lock on" to a single bandit at a time, which provides you with a red targeting reticule that shows up on your radar screen and keeps tabs on your opponent as it goes through obstacles. Aerial Strike's auto-aim is generally a boon, although it can be inordinately difficult to manage in swarms of enemies or in situations where you need to switch targets rapidly. For example, heat-seeking missiles seem to pose a particular problem for your supposedly defensive machine guns, which will often fail to lock on in time.

On the plus side, the Sagittarius has plenty of hardware to deal with threats, from standard lasers and missiles to a sniper railgun. Most of these guns require ammunition packs, which are strewn throughout each expansive level. If you want to maximize your combat effectiveness (and level score), it's a good idea to search every bit of territory for power-ups. Many of your weapons have secondary functions that can prove useful in certain situations, too. All told, the game's weapons are generally well balanced and fun to use--especially the sniper gun, which can save you a lot of trouble if properly used, and it is absolutely vital to some missions. However, it does seem as though your ship's basic laser, which will be your most frequently used weapon, runs out of juice entirely too quickly. Your enemies range from simple pirate rigs and air mines to stationary turrets to heavily armored droids and huge battleships, which must be dismantled sequentially. You can pretty much give your enemies the bum's rush through the first 10 levels or so, but after that, you must start implementing hit-and-run tactics and looking ahead to survive. Indeed, the last several levels of the game will pit you against large odds, forcing you to resort to guerrilla tactics.

You'll run up against a couple of big ships fairly early on, which will make for a few interesting boss battles. Unfortunately, you will also need to wade through many, many entry-level jets, drones, and ground guns before you start getting to the really interesting bits. If you're looking for variety, this business will test your patience. Another strange choice in Aerial Strike's design involves the interspersion of special robot-repair platforms throughout each level. Land on these puppies, and you'll refill your health to full, even while your ship is taking heavy damage from a multitude of sources; wait a minute or so, and you can refill again. On some levels, this lets you camp more or less indefinitely by a healing point and waste enemies as they go by.

Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions' levels are definitely on the huge side. The largest of them require up to two minutes of sustained jet time to transit entirely. You receive your primary instructions at the beginning of each level, and more commands and objectives arrive from headquarters on a consistent basis. Most of these objectives are appropriately marked on your overhead map, but some are unnecessarily confusing and will require a good deal of frantic flying and several wasted lives to identify. There are also auxiliary tasks to perform in most of the levels, and if you complete them you can gain extra ammo and props from the locals. If you do everything right, you'll rack up bonus points and unlock a ship library as well. A lot of these special tasks are silly non sequiturs; their inclusion feels like a stab at making Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions seem less like the straightforward adventure that it is. This game makes a lot of pretensions toward being nonlinear, but you'll still turn around automatically if you try to take an unauthorized shortcut through a level. That said, one of Aerial Strike's best features is its varied terrain, which consists of many valleys, peaks, rivers, and hiding spots. It's a lot of fun to duck in and out of canyons and gullies at will, seeking cover when necessary.

There are also a few obligatory stationary- and moving-turret levels that are intended to break up the core gameplay. But their inclusion in this game was a mistake. These boring, slipshod sequences are set up by lame plot contrivances, and the turret mechanics themselves range from jittery to almost broken. Aerial Strike's creators had another chance to improve the game by ditching them during the porting process, but they dropped the ball.

Aerial Strike's graphics and sound are better than Yager's on the Xbox, but this is due solely to the platform's increased horsepower--it doesn't look like the developers put much extra effort into retrofitting the presentation or fixing the previous version's problems. For example, Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions' water still doesn't look realistic, and you can still fly right through the obviously bitmapped trees and telephone poles with no collision or sound at all--it's literally holographic. Some level of persistent damage effects, like scorch marks, would be pretty much standard issue at this point, but the developers didn't bother to add them for Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions. On the other hand, the game suffers none of the performance problems of the Xbox version, which is a plus.

Aerial Strike's audio is of higher quality on the PC but is otherwise identical to that in Yager. The game uses bursts of music very effectively to increase dramatic tension or to indicate a firefight, and the sound effects, while not remarkable, are crisp enough. Voice acting is a very important feature for a game like Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions, which relies heavily on in-engine cutscenes for narration. The voice actor playing Magnus Tide is generally pretty strong, especially in sustained monologues; he doesn't do as well when delivering Tide's trademark deluge of one-liners, however, and they begin to sound kind of stilted after a while. The other voices are a mishmash of strange accents that can amuse and annoy by turns. The A Clockwork Orange-style sneering of the pirates is great, but listening to your querulous Russian comrade whine incessantly on one level will make you want to tear your hair out.

Aerial Strike's multiplayer mode is certainly a nice touch, but it's also totally obligatory on the PC, and it feels like more of a dutiful addition than a purposeful one. You get six ship types and 10 multiplayer maps to choose from, but that's about as far as this mode goes in terms of innovation. There are no multiplayer game types other than deathmatch and team deathmatch, so any sort of tactical thought outside of getting munition A to enemy ship B is out of the question. Furthermore, the game lacks any sort of server infrastructure for Internet games.

Overall, Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions is an ever-so-slight improvement over the console version of the game, which in turn means it is a passable dogfighting game for the PC. Still, this game is coming out a full four months after the original Yager, which was itself delayed by a year. This type of math doesn't work in any game's favor, and unless you're a big fan of aerial action games on the PC, it's probably best to let Aerial Strike fly under the radar this time around.

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Aerial Strike: The Yager Missions (PC) specifications

• Product Basic Spec
• Platform PC
• Difficulty Medium
• Stability Stable
• Learning curve About 2 hours
• Minimum
• CDROM 40x
• CPU Pentium 4 1.5 GHz
• RAM 256.0 MB
• VRAM 64.0 MB
• Game
• Developer Yager
• ESRB Teen
• Release date 2005-02-04