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After the phenomenal success of the Tony Hawk series of games, it’s no surprise that everyone wants a piece of the pie. The latest game to try and muscle in on Tony’s territory is Crusty Demons, which could well be described as an extreme, extreme sports title. At its core though, it’s a trick-based, bike riding, city-roaming game, and a clever premise can’t save it from being yet another copycat that fails quite miserably.
That clever premise is perhaps the best aspect of Crusty Demons. You play a man who is given a second chance at life, by the Devil himself. He takes ownership of your soul, as is common practice in second chances at life, and puts you to work as an extreme sports entertainer, but with a twist. Rather than simply pulling off spectacular stunts, the Devil wants to see some carnage and good old fashioned spilling of blood. You’re immortal, but can still feel pain, and that’s not something in short supply in Crusty Demons.
To begin with things go pretty well. An isolated barnyard setting provides the perfect location for training, and before too long I had learnt all the basics, like pre-loading jumps, bailing, performing tricks, and other little moves that could help me out during my extreme career that lay before me. Things got complicated rather quickly though, with the advanced section of the tutorial throwing button combinations and functions for almost every button on the controller at me.
Extreme sports fans will quickly adapt to the basics, with pre-loading jumps, spinning in the air and holding buttons to perform tricks being genre standards for years, but things like the awkward trick-linking wheelie move don’t feel quite as natural, and make high scoring more of a chore than it should be. The bikes themselves – and the many other bizarre vehicles you get to control – feature some rather twitchy steering, which doesn’t help when you’re desperately trying to line-up a jump with only seconds remaining on your task timer.
In typical Tony Hawk fashion, the game offers a number of cities, each with a large handful of tasks to complete. These vary from the pretty normal – collecting tokens and reaching certain scores – to the downright bizarre – flying headfirst into targets and pulling various items behind your vehicle on a chain – but to be honest, you won’t want to take part in challenges for long. They’re tedious, often plagued by a terrible camera and become more than a little tricky in the later cities.
The cities themselves are varied enough, but most are pretty small and annoyingly feature areas that seem impossible to get to unless you know the exact whereabouts of the entrance. Many of the tasks require you to be in a certain vehicle, and the simple task of finding the vehicle change point for each vehicle is a hassle in itself. The combination of small cities, dull tasks, twitchy controls and the often broken camera is enough to force any extreme sports fan to bail out.
Although not a terrible looking game, the Tony Hawk series has shown what is possible for games of this type on the PlayStation 2, and Crusty Demons doesn’t really come close to matching it. The environments are dull in comparison, the animations are stiff and the overall visual style can best be described as garish. While a great amount of fun can be had launching your rider off his bike, only to see him saw through the air like a mannequin, a better implementation of ragdoll physics would have been preferable. Music, too, isn’t anything to write home about, simply being what you’d expect to hear in an extreme sports title.
A free-ride mode, multiplayer split-screen and another task-based mode are available if you grow tired of the main ‘story’, but they don’t offer much that’s worth investing time in. Giving credit where credit’s due, Crusty Demons offers a pretty unique take on the extreme sports genre, but it does so with such a cack-handed style that the few good ideas can’t be enjoyed. This could have been the Jackass of extreme sports games, but sadly it feels more like a desperate wannabe.
