I sold my soul because the devil needed me to travel to New York to hold a 30 second ground trick. All part of his plan for Armageddon, I suppose. That’s basically the idea behind Crusty Demons. Your crew of hard living stunt riders dies during an ill-advised stunt attempt (are any stunts really that good of an idea?) and finds themselves in hell. In exchange for the return of their lives and souls they agree to do the devil’s work for a while.

While it may sound like an interesting set-up for a game, all it leads to is a game that amounts to a knock-off of the early Tony Hawk games. The game’s one unique element is that as one of the devil’s minions you are immortal yet still susceptible to pain and injury, so you’re encouraged to crash into things or launch yourself off of your bike and into the air. The game will then give you points based on a number of factors such as how many bones were broken and how much blood was lost. During the first half hour or so of gameplay it can be fun to watch your hapless rider go crashing through a pile of crates and bouncing down the road, breaking bones and losing blood the entire way. The novelty will wear off all too soon though as you’ll quickly grow tired of the long crash sequences and wish you could just stay on your bike. This is exacerbated by the fact that it is simply way too easy to crash in the game and you’ll find yourself being thrown from your seat more often than a baby riding in Brittney Spears’ car.

The game’s trick system relies heavily on air tricks and you’ll spend a lot of time launching your bike into the air and trying to string together multiple tricks before coming back down. Combos are vital to achieving good trick scores and are strung together by going into a wheelie between aerials. The tricks themselves are pretty standard for the genre but are harder to pull off than in most similar games. This is primarily due to the game’s controls which have an annoying tendency to be unresponsive (and even on occasion to be too responsive). Ground tricks are particularly frustrating to pull off as you’ll sometimes need to continually mash the trick button before the game will finally respond.

Even if the controls were flawless Crusty Demons probably wouldn’t be a standout game. The levels are on the small side and are unimaginative collections of ramps and half-pipes that just happen to be lying around locations such as New York City or Rio de Janeiro. Maybe the devil put them there. The missions are also painfully clichéd, with challenges that too often involve collecting items within a time limit, achieving a given score by using a particular trick, or collecting various icons strewn across the level. Yes, evil can be bland as well.

It’s hard to recommend this game to freestyle fans as they’ve already played it a hundred times before and with better tricks and controls. The controls are too frustrating to make the game recommendable to casual gamers or those looking to get into freestyle sports games, though. I guess we’ll just have to leave this one to the devil.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 54%. A unique storyline and bland, generic gameplay still make for a bland, generic game.