The Game Basics

Flight Engines

From first looks, it feels like Zipper used the gorgeous MechWarrior 3 engine. At the very least, it shares quite a few traits with the engine. The user interface is very similar as is the "feel". The way terrain and objects are rendered is familiar, but clearly updated to reflect more modern standards. However, something that impressed us with MechWarrior 3 that reappears here is the performance of the engine - even with 4x FSAA turned on, there wasn't the least bit of slowdown at even 800x600 resolution. The framerate managed to stay constant and smooth.

I made it, don't worry

Dammit Maverick!

The world that Zipper is portraying is bright and colorful, full of lush greens, sharp reds, yellows and blues and so on. The sky is blue, clouds are white, and rain isn't some piddly annoyance but comes down thick and hard, often at an angle because it's driven by wind. There is extensive work being done to make the terrain and objects not appear plain. Textures are detailed, catchy, and believable while the terrain itself is littered with all sorts of objects like trees, bridges, ravines, etc. It's not a flat, boring map you're flying over. It's a world full of all sorts of miscellaneous crap that you're not meant to notice, but that blends in to help fill out the overall picture.

I can see clearly now the rain is gone...

Not clearly enough

Chooga-chooga

There's more to the graphics than just the engine, texturing, and modeling. While CS stands perfectly fine on its own in that department, every game needs a certain amount of flair, of style to be interesting. The style in Crimson Skies is predictable - it's the 1930s where bigger is better - big buildings, big cities, big airships, and big everything is the rule of the day. Granted, most of that was built in the 1920s, but people are nothing if not predictable in how they hold on to past glories.

Your momma ship

You gotta do some crazy stuff

While it might be the period of the Great Depression, we're hardly talking about stagnation here. Not with multiple hostile states going at each other in wars - declared and otherwise. All sorts of crazy ideas have been tried and the success of some spawns the creation of more crazy ideas. How about floating aircraft carriers? Well, you're not going to get a 20,000 ton ship to fly, but a Zeppelin with a hangar could work.

In keeping with the strange idea/air power theme, the fighter craft here are rather crazy themselves. There is one that looks like the P-38 Lightning of World War II fame, but instead of a central cockpit with two engines on the sides, it has two gunners on the engines. Fighters also have rear propellers, gun turrets and completely bizarro shapes.