Crimson Desert Review

Crimson Desert from Pearl Abyss has long held the image of something too good to be true, with trailers showcasing its world, activities, and more. Now that it’s here, we finally get a first-hand experience of a game that’s held our curiosity for far too long.

Crimson Desert does indeed live up to the billing, albeit to a certain extent. If there’s anything that could easily describe the game, it’s that it is a game of duality, and of caveats and counterpoints – for every breathtaking vista, there is a hiccup; for every exhilarating sword strike, there is a clunky control input. The result is a game that feels like a title with a gigantic scope, yet simultaneously held back by its own complexity.

It is the perfect example of a polarizing game, something that is not for everybody. For those for whom the game is, Crimson Desert offers an ambitious and rewarding experience worth spending hundreds of hours on.

Tall Barrier to Climb

The opening hours of Crimson Desert are, to put it bluntly, a test of faith and patience. While the initial sequence drops players into an introductory combat tutorial, it quickly devolves into a meandering experience that will have players struggling to get past the 6-8 hour hump (or chapter 3, whichever comes first). You are introduced to Kliff, the protagonist, amidst a chaotic siege that serves as a tutorial for systems that aren’t fully explained.

And for every step forward, the game takes an equal step back. Crimson Desert looks astoundingly beautiful, especially when played on a capable PC, though it also looks questionable at certain points, especially with hit-or-miss lighting. The level of attention to detail is absurd, as players are given a gigantic sandbox that rivals some of the open-world greats. Creativity seems like the only limiting factor, as players can perform absurd tasks such as cooking food by shining a light reflected off their sword, arm-wrestling, and even building a settlement, among others.

This slow start significantly impacts first impressions, and it is only after you leave the initial path and enter the broader world of Pywel that the game begins to breathe and improve by leaps and bounds. Once the training wheels are off, the sense of discovery is immense, allowing players to go almost anywhere they can set their eyes on, but the game runs a real risk of players not even seeing the good parts. The world is vast and bountiful, cities and towns feel lived in, and there is much to do in terms of content.

If Crimson Desert feels at all like a single-player MMORPG, that’s because it probably is. The MMO DNA is felt in every aspect of the game, from its massive world filled with resource-gathering, complex gear-upgrading systems, economy and crafting systems, and countless fetch quests that often distract and interrupt players from their objectives. There’s a lot to see and do, and whether that’s too much is up to the players to decide based on how much they value the “hours played” metric.

Because of this structure, the game’s storyline is perhaps the biggest casualty. While the world-building is fascinating, the actual narrative arc is surprisingly generic, and Kliff is a bore of a character who struggles to connect with players. Even the world, despite the abundance of NPCs, feels like they are there just to hand over quests rather than have a meaningful existence from a narrative point of view.

Brilliant Combat with Troublesome Controls

If there’s anything that the trailers depicted accurately, it’s that the game has a combat system that allows for some insane combinations and potential. Crimson Desert is a tinkerer’s dream, and the game gives back to those who are patient and willing enough to invest in its systems. Whether you swing a sword, pick up enemies and throw them off cliffs, use wrestling moves to ground-and-pound, or execute flashy magical finishers, combat is outstanding.

Again, going back to the recurring theme of stepping on rakes, combat is held back by an extremely unorthodox control scheme. Perhaps more suited to a mouse/keyboard control scheme, Crimson Desert’s controller input is baffling, relying on archaic designs like repeatedly pressing a button to sprint or funky combinations of trigger and shoulder buttons that make things more complicated than they need to be, especially when some actions are mapped to the same button as with other actions, and will differ depending on whether you simply tap or hold it. It certainly doesn’t help that the input has a slight delay and that the camera could use some work, too, which compounds everything.

That said, the control scheme does take getting used to, and, like the game, once it clicks, it is extremely satisfying to pull off moves you don’t usually see in a title like this. Imagine pulling out an RKO from your repertoire, and you’ll immediately understand how absurdly fun things can get. Combat can get challenging, especially when going up against the multi-phase bosses, and it can be extremely frustrating and tedious because of how the preparation leading up to the battles works. If you’re caught with too few healing items, you’ll have to go through a whole looping process just to get ready again.

The more you play Crimson Desert, the more you’ll see where its inspirations lie. Combat, in particular, has that Assassin’s Creed feel, sprinkled with visual flair, while the density of activity and creativity in the open world draws from Red Dead Redemption and Tears of the Kingdom. That said, it doesn’t do things as cleanly or as polished, ultimately feeling like it’s trying to do so much but doesn’t really do any of these at a masterful level.

Untapped Potential

Even while writing this review, Pearl Abyss has been hard at work updating the game over the weekend with patches that directly address big player gripes that have caused it to initially flounder in its Steam reviews. The latest update fixes control issues, the aforementioned input lag, and more, making it feel almost like a completely different game from the get-go. These changes are immediately evident upon booting up the game, and the developers indeed know which items are critical.

While the responsiveness is commendable, it highlights an ongoing problem about launching an “unfinished” product that would just get fixes over the course of its shelf life. Luckily for Crimson Desert, the core is strong enough to withstand initial criticism, but it leaves a sour taste in the mouths of those who paid full price on Day 1 for a game that wasn’t quite ready for prime time.

PC Performance

Here’s what we used to play Crimson Desert:

• Ryzen 5 5600x, 16 GB DDR4 3600 RAM, NVIDIA 4070 Super, 1TB NVMe SSD
• ROG Xbox Ally
• Steam Deck
• ROG Strix OLED XG32UCWG

And here are the System Requirements for Crimson Desert:

With our setup, Crimson Desert played comfortably at high settings, even at 4K resolution, sticking to 60fps for the most part thanks to DLSS set to balanced. The game looks great, with character models showing fine detail and the world displaying grandeur that translates well on screen. That said, despite its impressive draw distance, pop-in is still evident but not severe. Crimson Desert is a pretty optimized title that scales across various hardware configurations.

Playing on the Steam Deck and ROG Xbox Ally, Crimson Desert isn’t a fun experience, but it is “playable” in the literal sense of the word. Switching all settings to minimum and even turning off some toggles like weather and ray tracing, you can feasibly run the game at around 720p, with frame rates hovering around the 30fps range with FSR set to performance. Switching it to balanced brings down the frame rates to around 20-25fps.

As you can guess, the experience isn’t pleasant, but when there’s no choice, and you simply have to scratch that itch, you can certainly choose to do so.

Verdict: Wait for it…

At this point in time, especially when Pearl Abyss is deeply dedicated to patching the game, Crimson Desert might be the perfect definition for a “Wait for it…” title. Given the developers’ update pace, it’s only a matter of time before the game realizes its potential.

That said, it isn’t for everybody, but those who can power through the opening segments will be rewarded with an experience chock-full of systems and activities, far more than what others can normally offer. Crimson Desert is packed to the brim, and that may even be an understatement, and it simply will not respect your time (in a good way) because you’ll find yourself wanting to explore every nook and cranny in a world full of possibilities.

*Crimson Desert was reviewed on a PC with a review code provided by the publisher.