christwofour's Full Review: Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge for Xbox
Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge is an engaging and imaginative foray into an alternate world where zeppelins and prop planes rule the skies. Taking to the air as the leader of a rag tag group of sky pirates, you find yourself fighting rival gangs and helping various friends and enemies to collect booty, improve your situation, and solve some mysteries along the way. Although it suffers from some turbulence, it's definitely fun enough to be worth its discounted Platinum Hit price.
You have to admit that calling a huge zeppelin your headquarters is pretty cool, and having a nice selection of funky airplanes to fly is even better. Crimson Skies gives you that and a nice selection of levels to explore and engage in plenty of dogfighting and side missions to keep you happy. All the levels provide plenty of area to explore and discover new planes that you acquire along the way to accomplish your goals. Main missions are always broken up into several objectives to keep the story moving along and to keep things interesting. And the plotline is offbeat and original enough to separate itself from most games and curious enough to want to see what happens next. Well-done cutscenes and good voiceovers keep the story moving along and provide some amusing entertainment while you ready yourself for the next challenge.
Learning to fly only takes a moment, and from there you learn as you go along from the myriad of challenging missions. The planes you find along the way all have their own feel and weapons, and choosing certain aircraft will help you get the job done better. Upgrading your plane comes from collecting booty and tokens so you can get more armor, faster speed, and more powerful weapons. The Xbox Live option gives you plenty of various games to play with fellow aces to try and blow each other out of the sky.
Each plane is well-detailed and the sounds of the prop engines, guns firing, and commentary from your shipmates further help to immerse you in the game. Each level benefits from almost photo-realistic graphics with convincing skies and great landscapes. Details such as buildings and other objects could have been given a little more time and devotion to make them more realistic and less Nintendo, but they arenā€™t horrible enough to ruin the mood.
The biggest gripe comes from the single-player mission, where some levels require a linear, repeat-until-you-master approach that seems oddly out of place with the rest of the game. You'll find yourself wanting to throw your controller through the screen in certain parts where your forced to watch the same cutscene over and over again while you try to negotiate that narrow cavern or destroy a boss' overly-complicated weak spots again and again. And upgrading your planes is neat, but you only get one general upgrade per plane with no customization of weapons, colors, or engines.
If dogfighting and flying planes is what you want, then Crimson Skies is a good choice for your Xbox. It would be great to see a Crimson Skies 2 come out with better graphics, more freeform gameplay, and fully customizable planes, but for this go around $20 is a bargain price for a really good game.
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