Completed Crimson Skies.
I stopped enjoying the game by Hollywood. First you need to beat a ton of though enemies and pick up a car with time limit. Then you have a mission where you need to fly into a tiny hangar and blow up its doors, while there’s still a chance you will be killed by debris. Then you have a race through the same hangar.
Planes in this game have ridiculous number of guns. In MechWarrior, having many hardpoints made sense, since you could combine weapons into firing groups. But without those, extra guns is just extra ammo, which means there’s no point into putting anything but the highest caliber. Same goes for the turrets, as those have infinite ammo, it seems. Speaking of ammo, explosive ammo is the best ammo type, with no downsides, which makes all the other types of ammo pointless.
Downing a zeppelin with torpedoes sounds cool, until you try. First, the torpedoes fly slower than your plane, you can literally overtake them. And they are armed only after 300m , meaning you can’t use them too close. The real problem? There’s no distance meter in the game, as far as I can tell. So I had to take the heaviest bomber, just to make sure I have spares.
I was sure that the mission in New York where you need to destroy a warehouse is bugged. You need to destroy 6 beams, which are tiny, and I’m not sure if they were made to withstand multiple rockets, or if rockets splash damage isn’t big enough.
The only way I managed to beat the warehouse mission is to create a plane specifically for it, with maximum armor possible, because all enemies focus on you, and multiple guns, because I was literally running out of ammo by the end.
The game has a bug where it sometimes would load key structures at wrong coordinates. The problem with that I discovered that the New York Police Station is basically not in Manhattan, but beyond map limits, half way through a mission where I had to pick up yet another tiny person.
It’s ironic that the final mission is one of the easier in the game, as there are plenty of allies and not that many enemies, and the final boss is just a regular plane, so it’s basically a joke.
What didn’t work out for me in the original game, compared to High Road to Revenge, is how unpredictable some of the mechanics are. I already mentioned that during the firsrt half of the game, most of my deaths were due to my wingman ramming into me. But even during firefights, the hit detection seemed pretty random. Sometimes enemies would destroy me within seconds, sometimes I would finish the same fight unscated. Only to bump into invisible geometry. It’s incredible how many times a game with such an unforgiving collision detection would either make you fly through very narrow spaces, often at 90 degrees, or give you a single try to pick up a tiny moving object.
