Crimson Desert Review: Ambitious To A Fault

Pearl Abyss has been teasing a lot about their upcoming game, Crimson Desert. It’s designed as a single-player experience following their popular online game, Black Desert Online, and the previews have shown a huge range of features. They’ve promised things like hunting, fishing, dragon encounters, jetpacks, a realistic in-game economy, puzzles to solve, and a vast open world – it sounds incredibly ambitious!

Crimson Desert aims high, and it includes all the features it promised. However, most of those features aren’t fully developed, leaving the game feeling fragmented. It doesn’t quite come together as the immersive, open-world RPG many players were hoping for.

60 Mechanics In Search Of A Game

Quantity Over Quality

In Crimson Desert, you take on the role of Kliff, a mercenary with the Greymanes. The game starts with your leader being killed and your team scattered after a surprise attack by a competing group, the Black Bears. You’ll need to reunite your team while uncovering the secrets of a strange, otherworldy place called the Abyss.

The game throws you in at the deep end. After a quick tutorial and a fast-paced story introduction, you find yourself in a bustling city packed with characters and activities. It feels like every building holds someone new to meet, and you’ll need to talk to each person individually to understand their role and importance.

The game offers a lot of different things to do, but none of the individual features are truly exceptional or deeply developed. For instance, the fishing is very similar to what you’ve seen in games like Final Fantasy 15 and Red Dead Redemption 2, but it lacks the strategic elements of choosing bait or lures. While the economy system seems promising, it’s mostly affected by unpredictable events that players can’t really influence.

However, the main problem is that most of these side activities don’t actually contribute anything meaningful to the world of Crimson Desert. I wasn’t driven to do them because they were enjoyable, but simply to get resources for upgrades – better weapons, armor, and food – so I could continue playing. Eventually, they just felt like tedious tasks I had to complete between the more engaging parts of the game.

The social aspects of the game – how you interact with characters and the systems for reputation and bounties – don’t really matter much either. Despite trying to give players a lot of freedom, the world of Crimson Desert feels surprisingly lifeless. Most of the people you meet are unremarkable and nameless, simply wandering around and repeating the same lines.

The characters themselves feel a bit flat, mainly because the story doesn’t have a strong beginning. While it’s understandable why you’d want to save your old allies and return things to how they were, the game doesn’t really explain what ‘normal’ was like or why it’s worth fighting for.

Once you establish the Greymanes’ camp, things start to improve. You’ll have a clear focus and a new way to use your resources. You can send your allies on various tasks – from taking over bandit camps to helping with farm work. These missions earn you money and supplies, which you can then use to improve the camp and send more allies out.

I found the management side of Crimson Desert intriguing, and it was satisfying to rebuild the world by reclaiming territory. However, it soon became repetitive, just involving collecting and spending resources to get more. The most interesting events seem to happen without the player being directly involved.

A Deep – If Unbalanced – Combat System

With A Confusing Control Scheme

Pearl Abyss

Crimson Desert’s combat is a highlight, though it’s not perfect. Battles feel like a mix of fast-paced action and methodical Soulslike games. You’ll need to learn long attack combinations and perfect your timing for blocking and counterattacking to defeat enemies.

The combat system feels fantastic – every attack and block has a real sense of impact. Successfully parrying an attack and following up with a powerful counter is incredibly rewarding. The boss fights are dramatic and memorable, encouraging skillful gameplay and clever use of your abilities.

Every character you can play has unique fighting skills and a way to improve them, but Kliff’s abilities are the most diverse. He can effectively learn multiple fighting styles, letting you use longswords, shortswords, polearms, shields, bows, magic, or even hand-to-hand combat. This means everyone’s experience in battle will be different, and there’s lots of opportunity to try different approaches and discover what suits you best.

Despite offering a lot of action in battles, Crimson Desert is held back by a complicated and rigid control system. It requires memorizing unusual button combinations to perform all available attacks, which led me to mostly use a limited set of simple moves unless absolutely necessary.

The game’s controls aren’t just problematic in battles. Even interacting with the world can be frustrating because the targeting system isn’t always reliable. For example, approaching a character at a strange angle might make your character try to jump on their head instead of letting you talk. I also accidentally performed wrestling moves on a farmer and sent him flying into the dirt while trying to jump over a small fence – it happened more than once!

I’m really enjoying Crimson Desert, but I’ve run into a weird issue with how hard things get. Most of the enemies out in the world are pretty manageable, which is great. But then, suddenly, the game will throw a super tough boss at you with no warning! I don’t mind a challenge, but honestly, sometimes your skill just isn’t enough to win, and that’s a little frustrating.

As a player, it’s really frustrating when a boss fight just boils down to grinding for better gear. It doesn’t feel like a real challenge or a rewarding victory – it just feels like a boring chore. I want to earn my wins, not just overpower the boss with better stuff!

A Brilliant Open World

Plus, A Quick Performance Check

Crimson Desert is most enjoyable when you take your time exploring, which I unfortunately couldn’t do fully during my review. The game offers a wealth of content, and while I didn’t find the resource gathering and crafting very engaging, there are many interesting side quests and hidden secrets to discover if you venture off the main path.

The puzzles in Crimson Desert are especially impressive. There are a lot of them – some are essential to the story, while others are hidden throughout the world, similar to the shrines in Breath of the Wild. I often found myself stuck, but in a satisfying way. The game doesn’t offer much help with these challenges, encouraging you to use your own problem-solving skills and carefully observe your surroundings to figure things out.

Pearl Abyss

It’s usually worth it to explore every nook and cranny—you’ll often find items to improve your character’s abilities. But even if you don’t get great loot, you’ll get to experience more of the stunning world of Crimson Desert and might even stumble upon a secret location.

As a fan, I was seriously impressed with how well Crimson Desert ran on my PC! It’s a really detailed game, but it almost played flawlessly at the highest settings – I consistently got around 60 frames per second, and any dips were super brief. I did notice some things popping in and out visually throughout my playtime, but honestly, it wasn’t a huge deal and didn’t ruin the experience.

A Blend Of Interesting Ideas That Fails To Gel

So Much To Do, So Little Time

Crimson Desert is full of exciting concepts and is incredibly ambitious in its scope, featuring a massive world to explore. However, despite all there is to see, the game often feels shallow. While it has moments of brilliance, players will find themselves doing a lot of repetitive tasks and uninteresting side quests between those highlights.

Honestly, playing Crimson Desert, I think it would have been better if they’d focused on doing a few things really well instead of trying to cram everything in. It’s awesome they attempted so much, but I’d trade half the features for double the depth and impact on the game world. It is a gorgeous game, and parts of it are genuinely captivating, but it just doesn’t quite come together as a fully realized experience. It feels like a lot of cool ideas that never quite gel.

2026-03-19 01:14