Crimson Skies
Overview:
Crimson Skies is a dogfighting game from 2000, based on the FASA wargame of the same name. That’s dogfighting as in “air combat”, not the Michael Vic kind of it. Players take to the skies of an alternate timeline 1930’s USA, flying a variety of fictional aircraft ranging from the slow but heavily armed and armored Balmoral, the lighting fast but fragile Bloodhawk, with plenty to choose from in between those extremes (though the majority of the game’s aircraft are more well rounded designs, with heavy and light planes being a minority of the game’s dozenish playable aircraft).
Controls:
The game controls well, provided you have a joystick, like most air combat titles, playing it with mouse and keyboard is outside the intended experience and the game wasn’t designed around that style of play. The simplified controls map well to a joystick, while true flight sims always had more controls than a joystick had inputs.
Graphics:
Crimson Skies has fairly unremarkable graphics for it’s era, but that hold up well by modern standards. The game is fully 3D, with the low resolution and simply style that was common back then, a look that while obviously dated, appear old the way that an 80s movie is old. You can tell when it was made, and how far we’ve come, but not in a way that makes the earlier one look bad (as compared to, say, 90s era CGI vs CGI from the mid oughts, where the earlier work is not just different, but bad in comparison).
Plot:
Crimson Skies is clearly aiming for a pulp adventure vib, and it nails it. The player takes on the role of Nathan Zackery, sky pirate, as he recovers sunken treasure, fights off secret plots by the British to seize the kingdom of Hawaii, rescue damsels in distress (and scientists in distress, and an accountant in distress), fight off other, evil pirate bands who don’t follow the Pirate Code, and basically
anything but piracy. There’s also a revenge plot against another pirate who screwed you over in the past, a romance with yet another sky pirate, and so on, all carried out via a mix of daring air to air combat and even more daring aerial stunts. Like I said, pulp adventure.
There are a few notable elements mixed in with that, however. Several missions have outcomes that change based on player actions, but not in a way that’s communicated to the player. For example, one mission has you disable a zeppelin to board it and rescue one of the aforementioned scientists in distress. But in the process, another band of pirates attacks, yelling at you for screwing up a score they’d been prepping for. Now, you can just grab the guy you were there for and GTFO, and you probably should since you and your wingmates likely got shoot up by the zepplin’s own fighters, and you’re getting ambushed by enemies in top notch planes. But, if you fight off the enemy pirates, you can loot the zeppelin yourself, since they tipped you off that it has something valuable on it, and you get a mission reward you normally wouldn’t have. Other missions are often more subtle, simply giving you a token cash reward for flying through one of the game’s many stunt locations.
Said stunt zones, in addition to being linked to mission rewards and sometimes objectives, are also the subject of a collection minigame, where the game tracks your progress as you fly through them and screenshots you as you do so.
Gameplay:
I called this a dogfighting game, not a flight sim, and that terminology was deliberate. Crimson Skies occupies a very narrow grey area between realistic flight simulators and the more arcade inspired titles like Ace Combat. Players need to manage their airspeed and avoid stalling out, employ fairly realistic maneuvers in combat and keep track of limited ammunition, but more complicated features like fuel ratios and G forces are excluded, the performance characteristics of various planes are based around their in game balance, not their true aerodynamics or the tech level of the time, and all of them are implausibly well armored for a plane from 1936. The intent is to create an enjoyable air combat experience with an air of realism, and in this the game succeeds.
Like many FASA titles of this era (such as it’s contemporary MechWarrior 4), crimson skies allows the player to customize their plane, using the airframe’s maximum weight as a limit on what the player can do to a given craft. Armor can be added or removed (this has not effect on aircraft performance, it’s purely to save weight needed for other features. A warhawk stripped of all it’s armor is just as slow and ungainly as one with it’s armor plating left intact), new engines can be fitted to increase top speed, ordinance hard points can be added or removed, and guns ranging from .30 machineguns to .70 cal autocannons can be installed (smaller guns do less damage, but at a faster fire rate and can hold more bullets). However, the overall performance and strength of the base airframe cannot be changed, nor can the amount of ammunition be varied (the only way to get more is to mount more guns).
Once you have a plane (bought from cash earned in missions. Planes can be customized and then sold for the value of the plane + mods, so it’s hard to lose money, the player’s supply of cash thus limits how many pre-made planes they have available), it’s time to take to the skies and engage the enemy. Crimson skies uses a somewhat video-gamey combat system, where all planes have an airframe divided into various sections (wings, tail, fuselage, etc), and a layer of armor atop that. Before the frame can be damaged, the armor must be destroyed. This likely sounds familiar to those of you who are familiar with battletech, though crimson skies is less forgiving than that system, once a section is destroyed entirely the target plane is destroyed, not merely forced to make do without a few parts. Also unlike battletech, different weapons affect armor and structure differently. Armor piercing rounds do double damage armor but half against structure, Dum-Dum rounds (an early kind of expanding bullet) do the reverse, while explosive bullets do more 50% more damage to both, leaving them stronger than slugs but weaker than specialized rounds, and solid slugs…exist, I guess. There’s no reason to use them when explosive rounds exist. Notably, you cannot switch ammo types mid battle, if a gun is loaded with AP rounds, it will fire AP rounds and only AP rounds. Thus, the best tactic is to rip through a foe’s armor AP rounds, and them switch weapons (no matter how many guns a plane has, you can only fire one at a time) to a gun loaded with DD to finish them off.
Crimson skies also includes numerous rocket munitions, though clearly intended to supplement guns and not replace them. AP rockets are, like AP rounds, mostly good against armor, though explosive rockets are more general purpose, and flak rockets are, like the name suggests, area of effect munitions that detonate a set time after firing. There are a handful of other weapons, but most are overly specialized or inefficient, such as radio guided rockets, the only homing weapon available and a potentially useful tool to players with sub-par aim…but they require the player to hit an enemy with a radio beacon rocket first and then fire the radio rockets that home in on that beacon, and if you’re good enough to hit with a beacon rocket, you don’t need a guided one. Anti-zeppelin torpedoes are another dubious tool. The game will tell you when you’re going up against any enemy zeppelin so you’ll know when to use them, but a HE rocket fired into an open gun port does the job just as well, and you can carry 3 of them for every torpedo and HE rockets can hit other targets while torpedoes cannot.
Mission structure is a fairly simple, objective based setup (IE: cripple the zepplin’s engines to slow it down, then shoot down it’s escorting fighter wing, then dock with it to rescue the scientist, then GFTO), and they’re normally quite fun affairs with enough challenge to require an effort to beat, but not so hard that you wonder how It’s supposed to be doable. Note the “normally”, because Crimson Skies does have a few missions that are massive pains, all of them for one of two reasons.
The first set is the forced stunt missions. While the game rewards you for stunt flying from the first mission and occasionally does so afterword, it never flat out tells you that you absolutely need top notice stunt skills until the second act, where a mission to infiltrate a Hollywood film set requires several very hard stunts as mission objectives, ones harder than many of the ones before. Flying through a gently curving tunnel is one thing, but flying your plane through the “O” of the Hollywood sign, and Egyptian tomb, and along a bridge (the former two you had to do sideways and after a steep descent to ground level, BTW) is entirely another, and unless you’ve been practicing a lot it’ll be hard. Oh, and there are no checkpoints, so if you damage your plane badly in a stunt, you can look forward to being an easy kill when the dogfighting starts and then having to redo the mission.
The second issue involves the worst plane in the game, the autogyro. It’s kind of like a helicopter. A very slow, lightly armed, poorly armored helicopter, that works with controls intended for fighter planes about as well as you’d think it does. You have to dogfight with this thing, and then in a later mission you have to do stunts and then dogfight. It’s absolutely terrible.
In the game’s defense, you can skip missions if you die in them a bunch, but the very fact that those missions (particularly the gyro one) is in the game is a mark against it’s otherwise excellent design.
Overall, I recommend Crimson skies to anyone who’s into air combat, outside of a handful of missions it’s one of the most fun dogfighting games I’ve ever played, and I think you’ll enjoy it too.
Unrelated note, I just realized that the Black Swan from crimson skies is very clearly a 1930s pulp version of battletech's Black Widow. Someone at FASA clearly liked that archetype.
