Author: TheAleosha

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.

From the 3rd mission, you already get a Balmoral bomber with two turrets, front and back. And plenty of missiles. Also interesting that you have not just one, but 5 wingmen, although only one is configurable. Unfortunately, it also means more planes to ram you as you about to complete the mission.
Using just the keyboard is suprisingly simpler than I expected. One thing the game loves you to do, though, is pick someone up from a plane/zeppelin/train. Almost every second mission makes you do that. And that requires matching speed. This is pretty annoying to pull.
What’s strange is that you can’t refit your plane. If you want another gun arrangment or armor distribution, you have to sell one plane and buy a new one.

Storywise, first few missions are about hunting after Drake’s treasure. Then we rescue our scientist friend from russians, and his daughter from Americans, alongside an experimental plane.

Maybe I don’t understand some mechanic, but the first Hollywood mission is brutal. You have to hit tiny police cars, then fight off two waves of superior enemies, then pick up a tiny car risking hitting the ground. Not fun.

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.