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Good: Ridiculous crashes, a decent amount of things to do

Bad: Races, super-juvenile sense of humor, controls, glitches, load times

Funniest Moment: Launching up a ramp, bailing at about 60 feet in the air, and then doing a cannonball onto a hooker

Crusty Demons is another foray into that age-old videogame concept: Bikers sell souls to Satan to become immortal, Satan likes to see bikers get hurt, Satan makes bikers hurt themselves to get their souls back. Sarcasm aside, nobody is going to put Crusty Demons down by saying it's unoriginal, they'll just accurately put it down by saying it sucks.

While it does certainly suck, there are moments of humor (albeit short-lived) to be found in the concept. It's basically Tony Hawk gameplay mixed with a Mature rating and a Satanic theme. Based on the real life Crusty Demons team, the game is an interesting idea that gets terribly brought down thanks to the actual gameplay mechanics.

Most stages resemble the open-ended areas of the last few Tony Hawk games. You can explore the levels at your own pace, collecting various scattered bonuses, or you can ride up to numerous people that have objectives for you. These objectives vary, and most are of the ridiculous variety. You'll drive around murdering pimps, popping inflatable sex dolls, and bail off your bike for some Human Bowling (straight out of last year's FlatOut).

Little annoyances plague the objectives. For instance, even if you knock over a pin in the Human Bowling part, the physics engine may cause it to not register if it's not completely horizontal to the ground. If it's leaning on another fallen pin, you'll have to completely re-do the mission. The missions themselves are all based on novelty rather than skill. Whereas the Tony Hawk games did a good job of switching between joke missions and point and trick-based missions, Crusty Demons generally presents only the former.

You'll get more points if you break more bones and spill more blood, so the more violent the crash, the better. At any point, you can bail from your bike and perform a ridiculous pose such as a cannonball or a swan dive. It's also possible to brutally murder pedestrians, and you'll even get more points for long "ped tosses." While it helps to break as many bones as possible, the game isn't anywhere near accurate in terms of identifying where the break is. I couldn't count how many times I landed flat on my head and it gave me points for broken legs before they even touched the pavement.

Outside of the gratuitous violence, Crusty Demons is simply a very sub-par extreme sports title. Between each main stage, you must participate in a race to move on. These races are absolutely awful, and they're ridiculously frustrating and poorly designed. It's far too easy to crash during these, and it sets you back insanely far when you do. I had to do the New York race close to 25 times in an effort to beat it, and I never wanted to see the game again after I finally did. It certainly doesn't help that you have to endure the ridiculously long load time whenever you have to restart a race.

Crusty Demons isn't as terrible in the visual sense as it is in the gameplay department, but there is a good amount of odd glitches, mostly involving environmental objects. This can be a huge problem in timed missions, such as when I got snagged on a barrel and couldn't break free, causing me to fail the objective. For the most part, textures are muddy and environments are uninspired. The soundtrack is fairly awful for the most part, and most pedestrians have terribly grating voices. Get ready to hear lines like "Bring it, dickwad!" multiple times throughout this title.

While Crusty Demons could have been a fun mindless distraction filled with humorous over-the-top violence, it is ultimately rendered almost unplayable thanks to some terrible gameplay. Sure, you'll laugh the first five or ten times you see a ridiculously painful crash, but it's not nearly as funny after fifty or a hundred instances of the same thing.

Graphics: 6.5

Sound: 5.0

First Play: 7.5

Replay Value: 3.0

Gameplay: 3.5

Overall: 4.9