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You also have the choice of setting the difficulty level,, which sets the number of enemies that can attack you at once. Each home base has a different looking control room, although the commands remain the same for all of them. Besides Options, from this interface you can check your personal profile, read the news, check the Galactic Map, and check the current jobs that are available to you.

Fig. 3. One of Tachyon's Control Rooms

The next interface you will spend a lot of time in is the Job Board. From this screen, you can view the current available jobs. Selecting a job will give a text summary of the job, which is spoken to you by the person offering it. From this screen you can also enter the Wingmen screen, where you can hire/release a wingmen. Wingmen have an upfront fee, plus they take a percent from the job's pay. The better the wingman the more they cost. Once you select a job you enter the hangar. From here you can modify your ship with available weapons and equipment. The shipyard shows any ships that are available for sale. rom this screen you also launch the mission.

Fig. 4. Tachyon's Job Board

Overall the entire interface is simple and straightforward. The only thing I would have added is the ability to enter the hangar and tweak my ship at any time from the Home Base interface. Currently the Hangar option only appears while a mission is still in progress (you've selected it, but haven't launched).

Graphics

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I'll get to the point here. I like the graphics a lot in this game. Every time you're in your ship you feel like your part of a large, well-populated world. There is little empty space. The missions are all well populated with huge (and well detailed) space stations and large ships (warships, luxury liners, etc..). All of the ships and objects in space look great. There are no graphical breakthroughs, but the combination of great space backgrounds (with nebulas, etc) along with the densely populated space gives this game a high grade in the graphics category. On my machine, I experienced zero lag in all phases of the game, even during heavy combats will many ships and objects.

Fig. 5. The Scrapyard

This is good news for those of you who are frame rates junkies. You'll have nothing to complain about with this game. Considering the size of the space stations and some of the ships in the game, I was pleasantly surprised to find the game ran very smoothly on my system. And yes I did have all graphic options at the highest settings at 1024x768. Another thing that was impressive was flying through the nebula. There was a mission where you have to fly to a base, which is completely inside a nebula. It feels like your flying in an inferno - the effect is very well done and adds immensely to the immersion factor.

Each ship has it's own cockpit, which shows attention to detail since there are a total of 11 ships which you can choose to fly. Each ship is very well detailed from external views. The skins of these ships look good and you'll find nice details like externally mounted weapons. You can even see the pilot through the cockpit from some of the ships. All in all the graphics are not setting any standards, but they are well done and are successful in creating an immerse environment. The development team did a great job on this game. How they managed such good frame rates in this game with its mammoth objects I'll never know, but I'm glad the succeeded. The cut scenes in the game were the only disappointment. They seemed too cartoonish for my tastes, but fortunately this doesn't take anything away from the game.