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Crimson Skies
by Jim "Twitch" Tittle

There are twelve different flyable planes. The flight stable is full of wild designs that are not too far from reality. Some look a bit cartoon-ish but they have soul. My favorite, the Bloodhawk, is a Kawasaki J7W Shinden clone. It is highly maneuverable and a total blast to fly.

There are airframes that can be gunned up with a large inventory of weapons too. There are twin engined bombers and fighters with rear gunners and Rutan-ish biplane fighter take-offs. Watch out for a twin-boom plane called the Peacemaker with a pusher engine and the cockpit in the starboard fuselage too.

Custom design screen

But best of all is the plane-building screen. Oh, I’d die for this in historical flight sims! You start with a bare airframe and choose your engine, weapons and armor. Plus you can paint them.

You stay in the confines of weight maximums so you must balance your build so as not to put to much armor, guns, or too big of an engine on it. If you go over the weight limit with your choices of components, you'll be forced to sacrifice something big and nasty for a less heavy (and usually less nasty) alternative. As you move through your career you can sell planes and buy/build new ones.

Most of the fighting takes place below 5,000 feet. Usually you are very close to the ground. This makes for heart-stopping events in combat. You will smack the ground repeatedly until you get into the flow of flying extremely maneuverable aircraft. Many of the planes in Crimson Skies handle like Spitfires on caffeine so it takes a learning curve touch on the joystick to get good shots in.

It is hard to stall, but if you do it is a simple nose dip and application of some throttle and rudder to bring things back to normal, stable flight. The flight models do vary. You will feel differences so it's not just a kiddy game. They must be exactly right too since they are fictional to begin with!

Bloodhawk

There are no wingman commands. Wait though. The A.I. wingies do about as well in their duties as they do in historical sims with several commands! I see about as many enemy aircraft downed by wingmen in CS as I do in EAW with all the commands invoked. This actually means that uncontrolled wingman A.I. is really better. You still, however, pretty much carry the show with your actions.

You have a couple of point-of-views from which to fly your aircraft. You can fly with the full cockpit and dash, or from a 6 o'clock chase plane view with a gun sight and instrument overlays. When you fly with the full cockpit dash and canopy frame you will be impressed with Microsoft’s perfect shading relative to the sun as you maneuver. It’s enough to acknowledge that there is moving shade but it is never so dark as to obscure instruments. Visibility at all resolutions is good and the hat switch is smooth for oblique viewing. The gun sight crosshairs is too light. A nice bright yellow would be better than the pale white.

Bandit positions are the tried and true Microsoft style of the “spyglass” to view the enemy with an arrow and o’clock position when they are out of windscreen sight. You can toggle this feature off if you wish.

The multi-player feature should be a blast since you can fly custom planes if the person hosting allows for them. The same goes for ammo, rockets and other components. Actually I can't see why anything should be banned. A big part of the whole CSkies premise is innovative construction. If a guy builds a hot plane it's a challenge to do better.

 

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