Review
Played on: Xbox Series X
Released: 2003
In recent years I've gone back to a handful of titles from the original Xbox, to explore releases I missed on the platform in the 2000s. A recent one was Rogue Ops, read about that here. Another title, which I recall briefly playing on an Xbox display stand back in the day, is the arcade flight game Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge.
It’s part of a tiny, diesel punk themed alternative 1930’s, aircraft franchise first devised as a board game in 1998, and then a videogame on PC in 2000. The relatively unknown PC release would inspire and be the basis for the sequel, High Road to Revenge, on Xbox in 2003. Although the PC version and Xbox titles share a lot of commonalities, it was only the Xbox release that received commercial success. Sadly, the franchise would die out with this release and never resurface.
Luckily, Crimson Skies: High Roads to Revenge is part of the backwards compatibility program and is available on the Xbox Series X/S. Let’s take it for a spin in the skies!
Released: 2003
In recent years I've gone back to a handful of titles from the original Xbox, to explore releases I missed on the platform in the 2000s. A recent one was Rogue Ops, read about that here. Another title, which I recall briefly playing on an Xbox display stand back in the day, is the arcade flight game Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge.
It’s part of a tiny, diesel punk themed alternative 1930’s, aircraft franchise first devised as a board game in 1998, and then a videogame on PC in 2000. The relatively unknown PC release would inspire and be the basis for the sequel, High Road to Revenge, on Xbox in 2003. Although the PC version and Xbox titles share a lot of commonalities, it was only the Xbox release that received commercial success. Sadly, the franchise would die out with this release and never resurface.
Luckily, Crimson Skies: High Roads to Revenge is part of the backwards compatibility program and is available on the Xbox Series X/S. Let’s take it for a spin in the skies!
What immediately is apparent with Crimson Skies is how satisfying and easy it controls, yet offers a neat selection of manoeuvres to perform more advanced combat. It’s clearly an arcade flight affair, viewed from third person, with fictional old 1930's inspired attack aircraft. Controls feel responsive and intuitive, easing you into the air battles with a nice set of simple missions at the beginning. There's a boost button too, which overheats your engine progressively, adding a little tactic to speeding away from oncoming fire or chasing enemy aircraft.
Story and visuals have a charming vintage appeal, with strong vibe of an Indiana Jones adventure with the main characters and the cheek in tongue vibe of the story. It’s an adventure plot with quite a bit of typical, dry, Indiana humour thrown in. Complete with stereotypical movie villains, mafia characters and evil scientists.
You play Nathan Zachary, a heroic, yet cocky, main leader of a gang of air pirates called the Fortune Hunters. As you work your way through the story to avenge your friend “Doc” Fassenbiender, you have to take on lots of missions to help out potential friends to aid you in your main goal. As well as earn money enough to upgrade your various aircraft.
The game is located in four smallish, sandbox locations. Here you can fly about taking on main, as well as side, missions. At any given time, even during air battles, you can dock with the Fortune Hunters main base, a massive flying zeppelin and take control over its anti-air guns. You can also fly near other land structures to take over turrets and fire them at aircraft pursuing you, while your aircraft is safe within a hangar. Other landing strips offer alternative aircraft to swap with or workshops that fix aircraft damage.
Variation in mission tasks, layout and goals are solid and fit nicely in with the ongoing story. Attacking massive zeppelins or moving trains come to mind as particularly existing. With the propeller based aircraft and noisy, slow rate, guns, it brings a vibe of typical WW1/WW2 dogfights. It’s satisfying to manoeuvre behind enemy aircraft and rip through them with the main or secondary weapons on each aircraft.
Later in the story, choosing certain aircraft to suit mission types becomes more vital. Choosing between fast, bullet spraying, guns versus slow-rate, precise, armaments. Upgrading aircraft will improve manoeuvrability, speed and armour. Unless you sink your teeth into doing many of the side missions, money is fairly scarce, so chose two or three aircraft to focus your upgrade money on.
The visuals are neat for their time too, with green islands on a blue ocean, deep canyons on orange sands, a skyscraper 1930s Chicago with a red sunset backdrop and a morning sunrise over the vast mountains of South America. Environment design is varied with a good balance between ground detail, impressively with a lot of mountains and buildings, combined with a pretty lighting and a detailed skybox.
Resolution is upped to 4K when playing on the Series X, sadly locked to 30fps, further showcasing how good-looking a release this was back on the original Xbox. I really enjoyed the diesel punk style to aircraft and locations. Select surfaces like the shiny metal on aircraft and bump-mapped water surfaces bring out some of the original Xbox hardware prowess too. For it's time it was a pretty flight game.
The number of missions, and their various tasks, makes for a lengthy playthrough compared to other arcade flight games like Ace Combat. I would've perhaps enjoyed an extra environment location, although I appreciate the focus on becoming familiar with them thanks to multiple missions taking place at each one.
There are some difficulty spikes here and there, nothing major and you can always grind for some money to upgrade before retrying a tricky mission. Otherwise, my main gripe is the somewhat sparsely presented story that moves a little slowly along. To flesh out the story there's a lot of radio chatter to listen into, but I would've enjoyed more character scenes as they have this adventurous, old movie, style to them.
Overall, a super enjoyable arcade flight game, with an enjoyable Indiana Jones vibe, awesome flight control in exciting dogfights and cool ideas like being able to dock during battles to fix aircraft or take over turrets. Seeing enemy aircraft ripped apart and fall burning down, with that awesome propeller engine sound humming away is neat, plus shooting down a whole zeppelin never grows old either!
It's an overlooked title in hindsight, I bet playing this over Xbox Live in multiplayer was a ton of fun back in the day too. It's a nice addition to your collection if you're into light-hearted, easy to control, flight sims. What better way to play it on modern hardware with resolution boost thrown in?!
