Crimson Skies demo

Overall: Combat flight sims are, in general, pretty cool. This one is the best ever, minus the gigantic bugs.

Pros:

As you'd know, a good joystick is required for maximum fun. Luckily for myself, I got such a joystick last Xmas, along with Fallout 2. But I was never able to find a use for the joystick, and it ended up collecting dust.

A week ago, I DLed some flight sim demos and reinstalled the stick. The two games I ended up enjoying the most were War Birds and Crimson Skies.

As far as flight *sims* go, War Birds was best. It didn't go into complex unlabelled buttons, and the action was identical to real WW2 action. In other words, awesome. Bullets streaking towards flying boats, sparks lighting up like giant bulbs as the bullets make contact. It doesn't get much better than that.

But Crimson Skies matches War Birds' action and adds about a thousand times better graphics and sound, and then heaps on a lot of extra, and more fun, objectives. Easily the best time you'll have in the cockpit of a plane. Even a real plane. I mean, this demo made me sweat.

For my joystick, there's a throttle control, which I still think is the best thing on there. The throttle control worked immediatly with the game, and that was awesome.

Every ounce of action is great. Lots of strange objects to shoot at other than just planes. In the demo, I got to shoot down a blimp, and blow up a bridge (for a good reason, too), along with the usual flurry of enemy planes. For the two playable levels, there were 3 different enemy plane types I was able to fight.

The game, while it was running, ran very smoothly, with all the effects turned all the way up. Nice. The graphics are pretty high end stuff, and you might want to have more than 300 MHz to play this.

As you should probably know by now, my affectation to PC games over consoles stems from the myraid of options not seen in console games. After totally reconfiguring the joystick buttons, I was pleased to see the choices in ammunition I was given.

In the demo, the plane you are given has 6 gun turrets, 3 different calibers. You can choose the bullet for each caliber, allowing me to make a heart-wrenchingly lethal combination. HE (high explosive) for the 50 cal, AP (armor piercing) for 40 cal, and dum dum (the opposite of AP, tears into light or damaged armor on the planes) for the 30 cal. I was also able to choose between AP and HE rockets, and then was able to choose flak rockets after the first mission. Flak rockets which do a nice amount of damage in a very large radius.

Cons:

You can't play this game for more than 15 minutes, because it will crash or freeze your comp. There is no avoiding it. The massive amount of bugs just totally ruins the package. Even in the full version, these problems exist.

Clicking to seperate option screens took more time to load up than actually loading a level in the game, thanks to some odd memory sapping bug. As you play, more and more memory is leaked, leading to a catastrophy as soon as you return to the game menus (or at least, that's what happens to people with 64 MB of RAM).

I was never actually able to play this demo more than 10 minutes until a fatal freeze forced me to hit reset. If I had played this game anymore, my HD might have been wiped out. What's also really sad is that the current bugs are quite obvious. There's no reason for them to be there. The makers might have just ruined their own game, because it's currently unplayable.

The bug that messes with memory, or whatever it does (read the Crimson Skies messageboards to learn more about that) leaves something like a GB of swap files on your fucking HD, both in the demo and the full game.

The in-game voices were fairly annoying, but contain vital information. I was able to solve this problem by turning the voices down a tad bit. Now they sound like background radio chatter, and it's a lot easier to concentrate on blowing stuff up. The voice acting is kinda 30s-action type stuff. Manly air pirates with fake voices, barking out orders to his female wingman. Wait a second, what the fuck is this game about?

Overall:

Perhaps the toughest choice for a purchase, a game that could easily be one of the best ever, completely ruined by bugs. Do you buy the game and pray for a massive patch, or avoid it? I can't even make up my own mind about this. If they patch it tho, it will be the best game second to Half Life. It's that good.

Review by:
Josh Cable

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