Crimson Skies

Microsoft

PC

All Ages

Review: Peter Eley

Imagine Biggles in a Terry Pratchett world and you've pretty much got Crimson Skies, an innovative and different flying game from Microsoft.

Don't confuse it with the company's flagship product, Flight Simulator. That's a serious piece of software used by flying schools to train pilots.

You wouldn't want to fly in a plane piloted by someone trained on Crimson Skies.

It's a rip-roaring comedy adventure, spiced with sexy females and outrageous plots, where flying skills are used to perform incredibly dangerous stunts.

The game is set in 1937, some years after America has broken into a series of lawless states because of the Great Depression.

The roads and railways have long fallen into disrepair, and planes are the only way to move people and goods.

You play Zachary Scott, a dashing air pirate and ace pilot, who undertakes a series of daring missions for profit.

It's all about daredevilry, and using Flight Simulator's model would have ruled out most inhabitants of the universe as potential pilots.

Crimson Skies is extremely forgiving and you can climb, dive or turn without worrying about all those annoying technical factors that make flying just that bit harder than driving a bus.

The aircraft are nicely detailed and look as realistic as those in proper flying simulations but here you switch on and take off without having to read a 100-page manual.

Crimson Skies is a refreshing take on one of the PC's cornerstone game types and is tremendous fun.

Much of its appeal probably lies in its fascinating alternate world — one originally developed for a board game.

Crimson Skies has relatively high technical specs, requiring a Pentium 11 266, 64mb of ram, and an 8mb graphics card.