Crimson Skies Redesigns, Emerges Invigorated

Thanks to TeamXbox for their review of Crimson Skies: High Road To Revenge, as the long-in-development Xbox sequel to the cult FASA/Microsoft PC flight game finally ships today, and, according to the reviewer, "...has added a whole new feel to the genre." 1UP also like the results, mentioning the "decent, but nothing worth getting too worked up about" version that showed at E3 2002, and lauding the year's delay which led to such massive improvement, noting "...the Xbox Live modes extend the lifetime of Crimson Skies several times over all by themselves." Finally, GameSpy join the others in giving the game a thumbs-up, suggesting: "This game exemplifies the sleeper hit; its unique feel, solid gameplay, and great aesthetics offer up something a little left of center, but it's something that anyone who's remotely interested in the genre should be checking out."

Comments

Interesting end to an interesting saga

[reiggin]

The whole chronicle leading up this this game was shown on some show on TechTV, IIRC. Anyhow, the show focused on XBox development and featured insider footage with the development teams and the product managers. This game went through several rewrites before the original team was let go and eventually canned. The game just sucked to begin with and you could tell from the tedious process they were going through and the dead ends they kept hitting. The product managers disliked everything they kept bringing to the weekly meetings. They even showed the dev team "showing off" completed scenes. I watched and kept thinking "This game is going to SUCK!" Later in the show, they revealed that the team was so far behind schedule and so mediocre that they were canned. They brought in a completely different team and they started from scratch. This is the fruition of their hard work. Congrats, guys, on what looks to be a job well done!

Re:Loved the Original

[Mostly Monkey]

I bought the XBOX version yesterday and this one has several prerendered cut scenes in it. Nevertheless I'm several hours into the game and loving every minute of it. At first I was dissapointed at how arcady the flight physics are, (Cruise speed is way too slow to be airbore, You can fly straight up withought stalling for a long time) but got over that when I realized how fun it is to swoop around and actually see stuff without it passing by in a blur. I can't speak for the end-game, but personally I like it better then the original for the PC.