Introduction: The Ambitions of Pywel
When Pearl Abyss released its Crimson Desert game, all the gaming communities kept on holding their breath. After all, with Black Desert Online, it could easily become just another grind-oriented MMORPG. Instead, Crimson Desert turned out to be a highly ambitious action-adventure game that tries to put everything you've got from the entire gaming library into the player's hands and surprisingly pulls it off flawlessly.
Kliff is the rugged mercenary who seeks to rebuild and reunite his faction the Greymanes after a devastating midnight ambush from their rivals, the Black Bears. Set against the huge and hyper-realistic continent of Pywel, Crimson Desert promises quite an epic journey. At first, it should be noted that the developers have openly mentioned that they use AI for 2D backgrounds. Even though it became a point of heated discussion in the online community, in reality, it is completely irrelevant, since upon entering this breathtakingly crafted world, you immediately forget about it.
Exploration & World-Building: A Continent Full of Distractions
The continent of Pywel is an absolute masterpiece of the open-world genre. Simply put, Crimson Desert is a visually stunning game. The daylight vistas of the vast plains and rugged mountains look absolutely breathtaking, especially if viewed on a high-end PC with a properly calibrated OLED screen. If you can see a distant mountain peak, you can go there and climb it effortlessly.
However, the visual part of Crimson Desert is not without its flaws. The nighttime and indoor lighting may be quite disappointing, as forced Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) introduces noticeable blur to objects in motion. However, all these visual imperfections become easily forgivable once you realize the amazing density of this world.
Crimson Desert suffers from glorious feature creep. It starts with a simple fantasy adventure and gradually transforms into a fully fledged life simulator. You are not just exploring but actively fishing, cooking, horse taming, decorating your home, and playing minigames with the locals. The main jewel of these distractions is the Greymane camp management. What starts as a modest starting point ends up as a city-building system where you send your companions to gather resources and build buildings to help your allied forces. It is extremely addictive and adds much weight to your exploration efforts.
Exploring this amazing world is also an ambitious task. Kliff can do an amazing job leaping around the map as he can jump in multiple ways, climb almost every surface, leap into the air to glide, and swing through the trees to travel across the canopy.
However, with all this amazing depth of the game, you will often find yourself in a frustrating war with the User Experience (UX) of the game. Crimson Desert continuously drops a mountain of junk, loot, and crafting materials in your face, and the archaic inventory system turns managing all of this into a total chore. Besides, the PC version currently disables basic accessibility functions, such as rebinding the crouch action to a mouse button or reassigning the inventory key, forcing you to deal with your own established muscle memory. It is a perfect example of a game that offers unprecedented freedom in its world, but somehow restricts your freedom in its menus.
Combat: Visceral Brawls and Convoluted Controls
When it is time to draw your swords, Crimson Desert diverges sharply from the usual RPG expectations. Combat in this game is not only fluid and hard to master but also incredibly brutal, giving you the feeling of being in a high-octane pro-wrestling match, rather than in a fantasy slasher. You are not just swinging a sword but chaining weapon strikes into brutal bare-knuckle punches, drop kicks and grapples.
Each encounter, whether it is an open-world skirmish or a massive battle clash, requires active strategy. The boss battles in particular are wonderfully designed and require you to think and adapt using your defensive system of slides, dodges, and counters rather than just mash the buttons. As you progress with the campaign, the introduction of the two additional playable characters Oongka and Damiane adds even more variety to this combat with their unique combat style and skills.
However, such a huge number of combat actions results in a frustratingly steep learning curve and convoluted controls. There are so many specific input actions for various abilities that you will find yourself stopping now and then just to check the command list. This problem is amplified by noticeable input lag, making Kliff's combat movement feel too heavy or "janky" and requiring some time to get used to animation commitments.
Additionally, the underlying RPG system behind your weapons is a bit undercooked. The game's skill tree is confusing and notoriously bad at explaining anything, providing tutorials for core combat mechanics many hours after the player already has access to them. Weapon upgrades also lack excitement because, once upgraded, all the standard weapons have identical stats and your loadout choices are purely cosmetic until you get the late game Abyss Gears to provide some unique elemental effects.
Cross-Platform Features & Ecosystem: A Seamless Transition
As a site dedicated to interconnected gaming experiences, we have to discuss how Crimson Desert fits in the modern cross-platform ecosystem. Naturally, it is a strictly single-player game, which means there is no multiplayer crossplay available. However, Pearl Abyss made a highly commendable effort to unite its players through cross-play capabilities of its game.
With the introduction of Patch 1.14.00, developers introduced highly requested Cross-Save functionality. It is an absolute game changer for such a massive game. If you spend 100+ hours rebuilding your Greymane camp, taming dragons, and exploring every inch of Pywel on your high-end PC, you can transfer your save data to your PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X|S and continue your journey from your couch.
In the age of huge single-player action-RPGs that trap your progress to a single platform, this effort of Pearl Abyss is highly commendable and shows respect to players' time investment as well as aligns with modern expectations that your journey should follow you wherever you play.
The Verdict: A Monumental Journey with Minor Flaws
Crimson Desert is not a game for everyone, but for those who are willing to embrace its overwhelming ambitions, it is a true triumph. It is a game where content is both a mile wide and engaging, perfectly combining the massive scale of a single-player MMORPG with action in character-based combat. Some of the narrative presentation may stumble, and the UI and control scheme may feel like a constant wrestling match with the game itself, but these are just minor flaws compared to the overall joy of the discovery.
It is a game where you can spend hours in brutal brawls and the next dozen hours managing your thriving town, taming wild horses, and exploring one of the most beautiful landscapes ever created in a video game. Pearl Abyss crafted an extremely unique and highly polarizing experience that constantly rewards your curiosity. If you are a fan of sandbox RPGs and don't mind a little mechanical jankiness, this journey is waiting for you.
Score: 86 / 100
Disclosure: The copy of Crimson Desert used for this review was purchased by the reviewer.