It was a great action alternate history flight game. The interface and characters were all dashing and suave, the presentation thick with American 40’s propaganda and the missions over the top sim-style. Crazy modified WW2 fighters mixed it up with huge Carrier Zeppelins, flying over a US fractured into warring city states.
I’d love to see it get another incarnation! I only played the pC game, so I don’t know what rout the console version went down, but I though it was a great balance between flight simming, interesting mission design and ease of play.
My perfect game would have a ‘casual’ representation of flight dynamics (stalls, spins), smart wingmen, a relatively fragile plane and missions with credible amounts of enemies… kinda like Xwing, where you could score 5-15 kills and not like the obnoxious flight games of late like Blazing Angels or Heroes of the Pacific where you’re a one plane army.
But mechanics aside, the setting and premise for Crimson Skies was so rockin’, I want another!
The XBox version, which is the only one I’ve played at all, had pretty much no flight dynamics. Not really flight at all–just an FPS with the W key held down, really. You travel at much the same speed whether you’re pointed up, down, or sideways. No stalls, and definitely no spins.
Unfortunately for me, I can’t stand trivialized flight models, so I didn’t like the game much. (I’m not asking for uber realism; something along the lines of what GTA3 had would be fine. And yes, it’s very sad that a game about jacking cars had a better flight model than a game about flying planes.)
Loved the PC version. The similarities with X-Wing are defintiely there, especially in flight and targeting. Good mission variety and pacing. I need to fire up the 360 and see how the BC is for the Xbox version, which I bought but never played.
The Xbox version of Crimson Skies had both stalls and spins. You’re right that the flight model was simplified to make the game more of an arcade game than a flight simulator, and the stalls and spins were more along the lines of “ok, you’re stalling now because you held down turbo boost too long” regardless of the actual aerodynamic state of the plane, but the simplified arcadey feel is what I loved about that game. For me, flying through the narrow slot opening of a building while barrel rolling and then pulling into a steep climb to get on top of the guy on the other side of the building before he knows what hit him was the appeal… unrealistic? Yes. Fun, in a old fashioned serial movie way? Absolutely.
I wouldn’t recommend the game to flight sim purists, and it is only really fun in multiplayer (so if you aren’t going to play on live or system link, don’t bother), but IMO it is a great game (just not a great flight sim).
I loved both versions, PC and XBox, for same reasons as CCZ stated above. Thrilling to fly through those narrow apetures, pulling off physics-defying maneuvers, etc. I’d snap up a sequel in a heartbeat.
Tricked in the sense I never thought i’d catch myself playing a board game. It was almost a pen n paper type affair actually.
Anyway you get this map of the sky or whatever, and you bought plane sets of different pirate factions and they each had different gunpoints, speed, armor, all that, and you got umm pilot cards that had special pilot tricks n stuff. The planes had little dial things that you could click to change displays of your armor n stuff. It reminded me of those marvel hero clicks. I always had a bad habit of flying off the map.
A lot of games would turn into people chasing each other in a circle. I usually lost. Games took a while too.
There are two boardgames. The most recent is a HeroClix variant, which I didn’t look much at since I didn’t like their other games. What I did see seemed crappy in exactly the same way.
The original boardgame, and source for the setting, is a hex based game with simultaneous movement, plane design, and grids of armor on each facing with chunks blown off in patterns according to the firing weapon. Reminiscent of the earlier FASA games Renegade Legion and Interceptor more than Battletech.
I didn’t even know about the newer HeroClix version. I was alluding to the original board game (which by your description sounds consistant of what I know about Fasa’s old school stuff), and was asking how the game measured up. Having had experience with Battletech, I can imagine purists having problems with the (no doubt) simplified mechanics of the PC game, and for once, I’m lucky not to have known the difference enough to impair my enjoyment.
The Xbox game’s mechanics are a bit more simplified than the boardgames, but they’re both pretty abstract. The most video-gamey part is that defeated enemies can parachute out health and ammo, and so there are often a fair number of enemies.
It’s more arcadey than flight-simy, but there’s just enough there to be fun, and I don’t think the “it’s like an FPS with the W held down” analogy fits. I too would have preferred a bit more flight model accuracy, but I loved the game anyway. It’s pretty cheap now, so definitely worth picking up.
The Xbox version was excellent, both single and multiplayer. The PC version had a better flight model, true, but it ws all over the place on story, the difficulty jumped up and down from mission to mission erratically…it was just kind of a problem child.
The Xbox game is more arcade-y, but it has the death-defying flight stuff that you really play the game for. It really delivered a better sense of the Crimson Skies world, the plot was strung together better, and the entire structure was better: each level was sort of an open-ended playground where you would fly up to areas and take specific “missions” in them. This would make a bunch of scripted (sometimes timed) stuff happen, but then it was back to just flying around the island or city or whatever and exploring.
I would love a proper sequel on the 360. The one thing I really hated about the Xbox version was the plane upgrading scheme, which was totally lame. This time, just give us money for doing missions and finding hidding stashes and stuff, and let us buy repairs, new weapons, and new planes in whatever manner we see fit.
