Crusty Demons Hands-On

Jun 6, 2006

Absurd name aside, Crusty Demons is basically a Tony Hawk clone. With motorbikes. And mini pimp cars. And broken neck bonuses, blood streaks, and demon-contract induced immortality. The game starts off with a group of bikers selling their souls to the devil in exchange for eternal life. These bikers include real life riders like Dan Pastor, Seth Enslow, Ronny Faisst, and Kenny Bartram. Though they can't die, they can get hurt, really badly. Self-injury actually factors into the gameplay, building your nitro meter.

For a budget title, Crusty Demons offers a surprising amount of content. There's a story mode, though not much of a story. It's set up so if you complete all the devil's tasks and go where he says, you get your soul back. The game brings you several stages including New York City, Cancun, Amsterdam, Rio, and Tokyo, forcing you to complete missions for random NPCs standing around. Each stage is without a time limit, so you're free to take on missions at your convenience, and in the meantime leak vital fluids as spectacularly as possible. After enough of a stage's goals are completed, a final race opens up. A win opens up the next stage, at which point it's rinse and repeat until the end.

For the NPC missions, many require you to leave the familiar motorbike mode of transport for more eclectic fare. For instance, in the New York City stage, you need to hop in a tiny pimp car for two of the missions. Imagine the pimp car as a Power Wheels version of a pink luxury sedan. Once riding on such a silly set of wheels, you can participate in missions like the Pimp Hit mission, where a prostitute gives you the task of taking out 10 pimps. Clad in green pimp suits, you'll need to run around the stage breaking pimp shins with your car before a time limit runs out. It's basically a stay-within-the-gates type of race and it's totally nonsensical, but it should give you a good sense of how strange this game is.

In addition to the story mode and its missions, there's a Devil Rush mode which basically mimics exactly what Tony Hawk 2 was. It takes place in each of the Story mode's stages, but gives you a two minute time limit. Within that time there's a checklist of objectives to complete that differs from the story mode, including achieving certain scores, breaking a number of targets or keeping a trick going along a certain route. For even more practice a Freeride mode is available as well, where you can ruin your body without the burden of looming objectives. However, since Story mode lets you ride around a level without a time limit anyway, this mode didn't seem all that useful, aside from riding around in unlocked special rides like the mini pimp car.

Before heading into any of the modes, you'll need to pick your rider and bike. Riders are rated for air control, flight, smashability, and trick skill. Bikes have wheelie, stoppie, spin, nitro fill, nitro burn, and speed statistics. Instead of boosting the statistics of riders as you complete levels, you'll instead unlock better and better bikes. After choosing your soulless immortal and motorbike, it's off the ramps, jumps, and precarious ledges of the stages. Crusty Demons rewards both trick combos and horrific body damage with nitro boosts. Using the two trick buttons, X and Y, players can perform air tricks and grounds tricks, using them in combination to string combos for higher scores. Prewinding jumps with the L trigger gets you higher in the air, and combining that with R trigger nitros puts you even further into the atmosphere. Beating more and more of the game modes unlocks new air and ground tricks to try out.

It's a simplistic trick system, but it's not just tricks you're stringing together for points, it's also body mutilation. At the touch of the black button, you can catapult your rider straight off the bike, sending him hurtling helplessly forward. This produces some disturbingly hilarious effects, since you can fling him straight into pillars, scraping down stairwells, or flying across vast areas of empty space to eventually crush his spine against the pavement below. At the end all the injury information is compiled onscreen, giving you point bonuses for broken legs, arms, and necks. There's also a graphic that pops up after the crash showing how much blood was lost, as well as how long of a blood streak you left on the ground.

For the especially morbid gamers, it's possible to watch the gruesome crashes multiple times over with its replay feature. After a crash, which can be fast forwarded with the R trigger or skipped with A, you can watch it over and over again, in slow or fast motion. Though the crashes don't show that much graphical variation, they're still entertaining just to how many ways you can manipulate the Crusty Demons ragdolls. The game employs a primitive Burnout-esque aftertouch system, so you have a moderate degree of control for where your body flies. There are even a few tricks possible while flying through the air, or at least the game's tutorial mode says so. From what we could tell, the body really didn't do any tricks before it splattered on pavement.

What you'll notice most about the game's graphics are the blood splatters, which happen pretty much every time you take a spill or intentionally eject from your ride. As soon as your rider makes contact with the environment, blood spatters all over the screen, and will continue to do so depending on the severity of the fall. Blood pools when your body finally stops tumbling around, accompanied by disengaged screws and gears from your bike, and any unlucky pedestrians you happen to drag with you. There's also a nice flame effect that shoots out each bike's exhaust when nitro or super nitro, available when your nitro gauge is full, is engaged.

The final game mode is of the offline multiplayer variety, and gives you the opportunity to challenge up to four players in five sub-modes: race, tag, theft, stunt contest, and crash 'n' grab. Race is, surprisingly, a race. Crash 'n' grab puts a target somewhere in a stage, only reachable by jumping your bike and ejecting into it. After a target is broken, another appears in a different spot. Whoever's able to hit more targets within the time limit wins. The stunt contest mode gives a win to whoever can get a higher score. Theft is a game of keep away, with first place going to whoever can keep the "prize" the longest. The winner of tag is whoever has the longest playtime in the round of not being "it."

Though the stages themselves are somewhat small from what we've seen, there are plenty of creative ways to rid yourself of blood. The game gives you a number of objectives, though most of the ones we've played through so far involve the same basic concept. Run around the level and pop or collect or hit items in a certain order, nab a certain number of points are the pervading themes. Crusty Demons does have 38 different vehicles, though, so it could change further in. Hopefully it does, because cracking your face into a highway overpass is only hilarious the first 50 times. When 51 comes around, it's all tears of boredom. Look for it around the end of this month.

You'll definitely want to check out the updated media section to see what we're talking about. Pimp hit!