This review was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content. It was written by Eric Dayday.

When I was first handed Crusty Demons for review, my first words were “what in blazes is this” (edited because my original words are a little too hot to be written here). Then I popped it into my Xbox, checked out the intro and realized that I actually knew the guys on the screen – Twitch Stenberg, Ronnie Faisst, and “Cowboy” Kenny Bartram of X Games fame. Then I realized that CD played like recent Tony Hawk titles, except with dirt bikes instead of skateboards. It was there that I realized this game had potential. After that is another story.

Crusty Demons starts off with the crew dying after performing some insane stunt. However, the prince of darkness himself steps in and offers the Demons a deal. He’ll resurrect them and offer them immortality in exchange for their services. Needless to say, they take the deal, and also needless to say, there’s a catch. They are indeed immortal, but he said nothing about feeling pain, so every crash will still feel very painful.

After the success of the Tony Hawk series, many extreme sports games have emulated its style of gameplay. Crusty Demons is no different. Take Tony Hawk’s UnderGround, replace all of the skaters with the Demon crew and other fictional characters, change their modes of transportation and trickeration from skateboards to dirt bikes, and you have Crusty Demons. Both riders and bikes have their own stat ratings, so be sure to keep that in mind when selecting who and what machine to ride.

Levels are set up as sandboxes, letting you go where ever, and goals/missions are initiated by talking to a local NPC. There’s a good variety of missions too, ranging from checkpoint races to destroying buildings to using your rider as a projectile. Yes, the ragdoll type minigames from the Flatout series have made their way here as some missions, and the animations of the flying bodies and their subsequent crashes are hilarious. It’s too bad though that it’s the same animation over and over again, so once you’ve seen it the first time, it’s no different the countless other times. Sad considering it pervades quite a bit of the mission gameplay. The largest obstacle in each level is the three-tiered stunt contest. You’ll need to impress some of the NPCs with high scores, which are easy to obtain if you can link tricks together to combo points. This is mostly done through the use of wheelies, the bike equivalent of a manual for those of you more familiar with the skater jargon.

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