User Reviews (1 - 11 of 61)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Crimson Skies is the most original story since Freespace

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: August 05, 2000
Author: Amazon User

In a post-WWI world where the flu epidemic has not stopped, abolition has been enforced with deadly precision and old wounds from the Civil war re-opened, in swoops this fantastic title.

Based on the board game of the same name by Fasa, Crimson Skies places the player in a world where the United States has broken into factions such as the Nation of Hollywood with it's high flying squadron the Hollywood Knights or the country of Dixie, formerly the southern United States. The highway system has never been implemented and the railroads are beseiged by bandits and state militias so commerce, travel and privateers take to the only place left, the skies.

Air Pirates, flashy aces, bounty hunters and government fliers, all of this, along with a distinct 1930's setting with it's big band swing music and jazzy rythym combine to form a truly unique world.

Players take the part of Air Pirate Nathan Zachery as he barnstorms and dogfights across the skies. From raiding a rivals fortress like zeppelin to stealing the infamous Spruce Goose from a Hollywood backlot as well as saving a comely damsel in distress from the top of a speeding train, Crimson Skies brings a player fast action and easy controls.

Filled with arcade type action and a user friendly interface, Crimson Skies concentrates more on dogfighting action than on learning the intricacies needed for more advanced flight simulators. Make no mistake, while not as complex as Microsoft Flight, Crimson Skies delivers with easy controls that get you right into the action instead of setting for hours reading the manual.

Crimson Skies is very likely to become Game of the Year for many players and innumerable magazines have already declared it a Must Have, and they are more than accurate.

Best Game Since TIE Fighter

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: April 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Crimson Skies is an incredibly fun game. The missions are varied and often quite challenging. I'm a pretty good dogfighter (note: no dogs are actually fought in playing this game), but the stunt and zeppelin missions sometimes took a frustratingly number of tries to get through. Still, I eventually acquired the necessary skills (and realized that some aircraft are better suited to some levels than others) and made it through all the missions.

Crimson Skies is more of an arcade game (flight stick and throttle are all you need to manage) than an actual flight sim (with flaps, ailerons, landing gear, etc.). This is fine with me, but some may prefer a more technically involved program. In addition to a pretty wide variety of aircraft, there is also a wide range of ammunition (which, like matching the plane to the task, also needs to be managed). Once you get into it, Crimson Skies is nothing but fun.

Like TIE Fighter, my favorite arcade-style flyer, Crimson Skies features a strong story line linking one mission to the next. The game features a cast of recurring characters - this adds to the fun of moving from one mission to the next. Do I get to push Ace Dixon around again? Yes. Excellent! It also helps explain why you'd do a stunt mission on the Hollywood studio lot you just shot up and from which you've commandeered the Spruce Goose. The instruction manual and pre- and post-mission summaries help build the retro atmosphere with news clippings, photographs and art deco-themed memorabilia.

If Amazon were to allow half stars in the ratings, this would come in at 4.5. How could it be even better? Two of the things that made TIE Fighter so much fun were its flight recorder and side missions. The recorder let you go back and view your mission from any desired angle. It would make Crimson Skies even more enjoyable if you could go back and see things you've shot down crash and burn instead of having to immediately switch to your next target. The side missions in TIE Fighter amounted to going further and further over to the Dark Side. In the first few missions of Crimson Skies it looked like there'd be added "targets of opportunity" (shooting the munitions truck on the suspension bridge, destroying the work camp, etc.), but they soon dried up to be replaced primarily with stunt flying. An offhand comment about Germans early on has a payoff at the end of the game, but it would have been nice to feel the big ending building up more over time.

It's not entirely fair to evaluate a game for what it isn't, so please don't let my comment above dissuade you from buying this game. Crimson Skies is simply the most fun I've had in a long time, and while it's possible that it could be improved, it's pretty close to perfect as it is.

great game, bad patch

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: January 07, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This is a great game, but the patch doesn't solve the save-game problem like Microsoft claims. The first thing I did after i got the game was install the upgrade, but when I designed a plane in Instant Action mode and then returned to the campaign, my saved game wasn't there anymore, although the patch was specifically supposed to solve that problem, among others. So my advice is, play the campaign game to the end and THEN try instant action. I don't know about games being erased in multiplayer, but I'd use caution there too. Also, if you don't have DirectX 8, the game will give you an error message, telling you it needs it, and that involves a visit to the DirectX website and a half-hour download of yet another upgrade. But the bottom line is, the game is worth the headaches, and that's a high compliment, considering what a pain it was just to install it. I haven't been playing it very long, but hopefully I won't run into any more problems. I'm running on a Dell PIII 700 with 128 RAM and NVIDIA TNT2 32mb graphics card, if that matters.

VAW_Basilisk06 Gives his view

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: February 15, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I have owned or played virtually every combat flight simulator that was ever worth anything on the market and even experimented with a few. This is by far the most enjoyable online experience with customizable planes, armor, ammunition and engines you can practically create your own weapon of destruction or flying coffin. I have played the game through to the end and enjoyed every minute of it. Although the enemy AI could use some work the flying challenge in some of the missions make up for it. Also the Difficulty level can be increased to provide that extra challenge. The slow menu load time is a known glitch and I fell with the quality of the graphics , is worth the wait. I have run this game on a COMPAQ Presario 1700XL laptop PIII500 with 196MB ram and it plays fine. My main system is a PIII650 256MB RAM Voodoo5 5500 64MB and I have had no problems at all. It plays much better in Windows 2000 Server as well as Professional than in Windows ME with greater stability both online and offline. I guess the issue is whether or not your mix of harware is optimized to run the game not necessarily the specs. If your hardware must use extra resources to intercommunicate then you would realize degraded performance. Hell It worked on the laptop with 8MB of video ram and no voodoo or high end graphics just a Rage mobile graphics chipset. I think the increased hardware requirements are overrated. I have tried it on 4 machines and have had no need to go any higher than PIII650. The Voodoo3 issue is valid though I have encountered the crash with the demo and did not have the card available for the full version test.

Crimson Skies: A Great Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: November 07, 2001
Author: Amazon User

First I don't own this game, but have the demo version. And I'm planning of purchasing this game. This game (for my case, demo) is very fun that it'll make you stick to your computer for hours. It has both Multiplayer and Singleplayer missions. The thing made me most astonish is that when playing over Internet, it's soooo smooth, except for occational mis-graphics. You can custamize your plane as you earn money in the singleplayer. You just do what they tell you to do and start shooting the bad guys down. It feels soooo good. I really love the sound of the machine guns.

Wow!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: September 15, 2000
Author: Amazon User

The graphics are incredible and the action is superb. Dogfighting in the clouds or over Manhattan at night is awesome

This is a quantum leap in flight sims.

Help Please

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: January 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I love this game, but can't play it to save my life. I have a Pentium II 400 MHz with 96 MB RAM and a Voodoo 3 Video Card with 16 MB VRAM on it. Every single mission crashes NEARLY every single time I play the game. I have only been able to manually close the game once because all other times it crashed on me. I have all settings on low and still the problems. I meet or exceed all system requirements. And I have installed the latest patch. Can anyone help me? yardgod@pacbell.net

An Entertaining Gem of a Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: July 30, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I have always enjoyed flight sims, but I was never big into reinacting historical combat or being locked into strict physics modules. I have always like creative stories and fascinating ideas, but it is becoming harder to find such creativity.

So when I say that Crimson skies has really grabbed me and consumed enourmous amounts of my spare time, it should be apparent that it is soemthing special.

This game has managed to take a wonderful story- involving alternative history, a style of story-telling that echoes of '40's radio drama, swashbuckling action and wonderful voice work- and combine it with a flight engine that is close enough to real physics to feel real but far enough removed to be fun, easy to learn and challenging without requiring you to be a pilot.

Atmosphere is the byword to describe this game. The designers adapted the concept wonderfuly and it is totaly engrossing and enjoyable. I heartily recomend this game, which I feel is one of the best and possibly THE best, in the genre of action flight games.

best game I've played since Thief

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: October 12, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I love the originality of this game. I won't describe the gameplay since that's been covered well by previous reviewers. The game runs as smooth as butter on my system (all settings cranked to the max) which is a Dell Dimension XPS 733r. That is a coppermine 733 Mhz, 128 MB RDRAM, GeForce 256 with 64 MB DDR RAM (Dell Brand GeForce) Sound Blaster Live. The only problem I have noticed is the mouse movement, which can be a little jerky in the menus. The load times do seem a little lengthy, but not unreasonable as with previous reviewers.

Unique Fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: October 13, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Crimson Skies does what most games attempt to do, but few accomplish... create a believable, engrossing world that's incredibly fun! Sure, it's more of an arcade shooter than an actual flight sim, but that's fine by me. Most of the other flight sims I've tried are too mired in the details. Running out of fuel in the middle of a mission is not my idea of fun. Crimson Skies glosses over those details. Heck, you don't even get a fuel gauge! You do get a limited number of missiles (to keep you honest, I suppose) but the huge amount of ammo you carry will keep your machine guns warm the entire mission through.

Set in (a fictional) 1937, your planes are of limited technology. There are no radar screens here, but the game's designers compensate in a unique way. You can still "lock on" to a target, and it will display brackets around it if you're facing it. However, if the target leaves your range of vision, a "spyglass" will appear pointing you in the right direction (4:00, 5:00 etc...). While not exactly realistic, this avoids the speck hunts I used to have to do when playing my favorite bi-plane simulator (Red Barron). Of course, if you like straining your eyes, you can shut the spyglass off.

The complaints about the load times are deserved; they can take longer than expected. Download the patch from [Microsoft] to avoid the few glitches that shipped with the product. The patch doesn't speed up the load times, but it does make the game as stable as your coffee table.

Crimson Skies ranks as one of the most entertaining arcade-style flight sims ever made. Don't miss it!

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next 

Actions