Crimson Skies

Original Crimson Skies for PC is a very different beast from its Xbox sequel. The tone is immediately set as a pirate treasure hunt. There are no cutscenes, instead we have radiodrama-like briefings. And the biggest difference is the plane setup. Like in Mechwarrior games, you have weight limit, and you can chose the type of your engine, distribute armour across 4 regions, and most importantly, choose weapon for each of the 6 hardpoints. And for each weapon, you can even pick multiple ammo types.

Bullets have trajectory, indicated by tracers, and aren’t infinite. Missiles are even more finite. I complained that missile stock in High Road to Revenge was much lower than in Ace Combat games, although it could be refilled during mission with pickups. Here, you have 4 missiles, and that’s it. You can also see them on the aircraft belly, which is really cool.
The enemies go down quickly, though, and are few in numbers, so I’m yet to feel need for ammo.
Collisions are quite deadly. I died a few times at the very first seconds of the mission simply because my wingman flew out of the airship right after me, and rammed my plane. And 2nd mission requires you to follow a bomber, which I rammed by mistake as well, downing it and failing the mission.

The game uses Mechwarrior 3 engine, which is obvious to anyone by it’s quite unique picture-in-picture mode, that’s used to track enemy aircraft. That’s pretty neat, as you don’t only get to see their relative direction, but also which way they’re facing. That’s the only good thing I can say about those visuals, though. The lighting is flat, and so are the textures. There’s 3 years difference between Crimson Skies and High Road to Revenge, but the technological gap is vast.

I didn’t manage to make my Xbox One controller work with Crimson Skies despite multiple guides. And I had to use RivaTuner in order to limit FPS, otherwise the game runs at 4x speed with 240FPS.