Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge

Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null

Crimson Skies for the Xbox! With great Xbox Live support!

Crimson Skies is an action game in the skies above an alternative 30's USA, fractured into a multitude of warring nations and with planes and zeppelins being the main means of transportation. You are Nathan Zachary, a famous air pirate of the good thief type initially out to get back the zeppelin you lost on a bad gamble but soon getting involved in much larger things.

There's a single player campaign and a nice amount of Xbox Live gametypes on offer here. Everything I read kept saying something along the lines "the single player is solid, but Xbox Live is where the game really shines", but I had higher hopes for the single player. Being totally sold on the experience of Crimson Skies for the PC, a game with some great production values behind it and wonderful attention to sound and music detail I wanted more of that atmosphere. The average reviewer seems to be more into multiplayer than I am in any case, so I was hoping the game could live up to its predecessor. But I have to say this game didn't bring me the thrills the first one did.

But don't get me wrong, there's a lot of fun to be had. The basic gameplay is totally solid, many missions are a lot of fun and the difficulty's just right. But the overall story failed to draw me in, the characters felt a little thin on character and there was no real sense of tension mounting toward the end. In fact it was unclear how far off the end was right up until a while into the last mission. And the two last missions were actually the least entertaining ones in the whole game. Waltzing through a hopelessly contrieved cave system isn't what I want from my flying games, and when even Zachary himself makes sarcastic remarks about it you start seriously wondering why the designers included that mission at all. The very last mission? Well, how about a time consuming boss fight without halfway checkpoints? With a time limit? Only they don't tell you what the time limit is? Luckily it's not that difficult if you stay calm, but when they decided to have classic bosses they could at least have made them fun, right?

I'm going to complain about the music too since I haven't got around to it before: what's the matter with all this depressing stuff? Where's the upbeat high-adventure, pulse-pounding heroic music? There are some tunes that resemble the good stuff from the old Crimson Skies, but it feels like they're too far between. The main menu music is more death and darkness than anything else. It's like Star Wars opening with some mellow piece (Luke's theme or something like that?). People would have got up and left the theatres before the introduction was over ... Give the game a proper theme for crying out loud!