Crimson Desert Review

On paper, Crimson Desert is the ultimate open-world action-adventure. A $109 premium title with a prestige look and sound. One of the year’s most impressive technical showcases, with more gameplay elements than can be reasonably mapped to the humble DualSense. Its continent-spanning story centres on your mission to reclaim a homeland and reunite a scattered people. The setting of Pywel is ripe with flora, fauna, life, societies, secrets, and most importantly, content. If you’re a gamer wholly subscribed to the ‘playtime equals satisfaction’ gospel, I can confidently guarantee that you can lose an easy hundred hours in this world – if you can withstand the glacial pacing and lack of a rewarding gameplay loop. After spending 70 hours in this game, my three overwhelmingly positive takeaways are the visuals, performance, and acting. Everything else about my experience fails to elicit the same enthusiasm.

Of the various playable characters that the game purports to have, the vast majority of your time will be spent as Kliff, the resurrected freesword of a company called the Greymanes. Your crew has been scattered across the western regions of the continent, and you’re set on getting them back together and retaking your home from the competing Black Bears faction. Gods, peasants, mercenaries and lords alike attempt to involve themselves in your quest, pulling you away to settle their conundrums along the way. 

A significant amount of playtime is spent on horseback, pingponging around the European medieval-inspired Hernand on the west of the continent until the plot moves you towards the neighbouring four regions. This frequent transit downtime along Kliff’s critical path stunningly showcases the vast Pywel. Creatures and people look, sound, and behave organically in a world brimming with detail density. When I’m not being chased out of hostile territory, I am often moved by the tranquillity on display. Then a major weather event moves in and transforms the visuals in a new, rain-soaked light. 

… Just when I wanted to get in the kiln

Bringing all of this to life on the PC is surprisingly effortless. There is a generous suite of graphics options available on the platform, and with the game’s tech barely tarnished on lower settings, I mixed and matched ray-tracing, DLSS, and other effects to find a presentation smoothness that almost always performed excellently. While technically impressive, it’s not without a couple of minor flaws. Lighting, particularly in dark indoor spaces, often makes the environment unreadable until the luminescence adjusts (if it does). Likewise, there was also an aggressive blur effect that trails objects in low-light settings. Some very minor texture pop-in aside, all these hiccups do little to detract from the awe on display as you trek about or gaze out from a mountaintop. 

The crucial sense of place that Crimson Desert needs for its fantasy world to stand out is achieved not only through the eye-watering visual package on offer, but also through its surprisingly robust and well-considered voice acting. Many different societies and species inhabit Pywel, and all of them are fully voiced effectively. Affectations, accents, mannerisms and idioms are given life by authentic and enthused performances applied to everyone from the Irish goblins to the posh Trolls. This translates fabulously to the often dramatic and action-heavy critical path in-game cinematics. Whether subtle or extravagant, the motion capture, lip syncing, language, and physicality are all given oomph courtesy of the strong voice work. Outside of the main quest path, lines are still similarly well-delivered and diverse, but suffer from poor editing that sees distracting pauses taking up the oxygen between every line utterance.  

With horizons this sublime, who needs cinematic framing?

When the controller is active in the player’s hands, the gameplay shows itself as either fine at best or concerningly underbaked. If you read my preview of Crimson Desert, you’d hopefully gleaned two key things. First, it’s stacked with about every system and feature you could expect to find in a game inspired by the greater open-world adventure sub-genre rather than any specific titles. Secondly, it was languid. Back then, my first four hours were filled with beauty, but also a lot of low-stakes side-questy labour masquerading as critical path objectives. Well, at hour 40, as with hour four, these two things remain true. In its mission to feature everything a player could want in a sandbox this pretty, I fear that consideration of the actual player experience may have been somewhat misguided. 

Fishing, mining, animal husbandry, settlement development, various original gambling activities, skill contests, cooking, alchemy, crafting, flying, environmental destruction, faction dynamics, market trading, cosmetic colouring, horse racing, ro-sham-bo, there’s virtually a hundred different gimmicks to get lost amongst in Crimson Desert. I’m still stumbling upon more at the time of writing. However, while almost all of these are competently functional at best, most remain frustratingly undercooked or difficult to engage with. Most gambling activities require absurd amounts of money to engage with, locking me out because I had spent 90% of the game flat broke due to the constant, high cost of health items. Life activities like chopping wood quickly become necessary to keep Kliff and company competitive. 

Gathering activities like these channel the Survival or MMO tedium of simply having the tool and interacting with the target resource. Yields are stingy, the activities are frustratingly time-consuming, and crucial systems like gear upgrades and healing items will syphon all of your efforts in an instant. Your grinding out in the world is typically rewarded with the most minor of stat upgrades or embarrassingly few impactful healing items. Not faring much better are the side quests, which typically reward players with little more than one to three inventory slots for their lengthy efforts.  

It’s called fashion, look it up

My biggest gripe with Crimson Desert is with its combat balancing. Your first moments in Crimson Desert will be spent coming to grips with its weighty and flashy swordfighting action. Notably, your first encounters are outdoors, surrounded by heaps of foes. In these Musou moments of fields piling up with Kliff’s hacked foes, the combat systems pop off as intended. When Kliff is in a room or enclosed arena, the camera gets nervous, and it’s not unlikely that either Kliff or your foe gets stuck in the environment. Worse still is the game’s approach to endurance and health management. 

After about a dozen hours in this game, I felt compelled to actively avoid combat. The one reason: the game is stingy with its expensive restorative items. If Kliff finds any free healing items, you’ll be incredibly lucky if it restores 25% of his health. Most bosses will obliterate that with a sneeze, while also requiring you to defeat them two or three times in a single skirmish. Because bosses are often on the tail-end of a series of grunt fights, you’ve probably used up most of your reserved healing items before the big baddie. Very quickly, you’ll realise that the game wants you to pause between the boss and the fodder, go back home and grind for ingredients for the better part of 15 minutes, cook a bunch of dishes one at a time, and then make the journey back to the boss arena. In practice, this absolutely murders the momentum of this game’s action without fail. For all my time spent gathering healing resources to prepare for fights, I never felt good afterwards, as the rewards were rarely ever worth the overall cost to my time.

This game loves a thrilling mid-boss-fight cutscene or four

Between the presentation and the confounding approach to combat pacing, the rest of the game felt pretty middling to me. Controls are a constant pain, with frequent unresponsiveness and a general clunkiness that sees Kliff interact with the world with the grace of a bull in a china shop. The game has an ambivalent attitude to player guidance, too. It’s very common that the game gives you objectives that miss steps, leaving the player clueless about how to proceed until they waste half an hour cycling through all the different systems that might lead to progress. Interfaces are a mixed bag, with some elements taking close to ten seconds to load. Inventory management frustrates, often making you interact with each individual item in a bag of hundreds. The long load screens and unskippable cutscenes kill my enthusiasm for the harder, three-phase boss fights that squeeze cutscenes in between every phase. 

You might be a player excited by the prospect of a hundred-hour open world adventure, but what happens if that experience is bogged down by a lack of adequate gameplay direction, resulting in time wasted and you getting stuck on unclear objectives? It won’t be long before the game introduces main quests that involve Kliff finding an item or accessing a closed area. An example I encountered more than once had me try to find a key in a room filled with objects and furniture. The key will be so small and lacking in detail, and the surroundings so detailed and interactive, that it will be like a needle in a haystack. As for the closed-off areas, these could be environmental puzzles. You may also be requiring an item, or a hidden entrance, or you’ve accidentally hit quest markers in the wrong order. The player is rarely ever given feedback or even a suggestion from Kliff about how to approach his current circumstances. Objectives often give you the where, but no indication of how. I would have loved to have had a lick of that infamous yellow paint, a high contrast indicator, or even a tooltip or utterance to get me back on track.  Instead, environmental objectives have me pixel hunting my way through most of this ostensibly non-point-and-click game. 

Final Thoughts

MMORPG developer Pearl Abyss claims that Crimson Desert is an open-world action adventure. While it certainly looks the part, I can’t concur. From its side-quest heavy gameplay loop to a reliance on exhaustive grinding, this is very much this developer’s vision of a Red Dead Redemption 2 or Dragon’s Dogma 2 competitor, but with the design philosophies of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. While that doesn’t inherently doom this title, it does emphasise how solitary and laborious an MMORPG experience can be when completely alone in its world. 

In an ambition to feature novelties, systems, and gimmicks from all the best in the genre, it never goes the distance to integrate these disparate elements in a way that provides a satisfying reward loop for the player. Instead, while you’re forced to scrimp and save to restock your crucial consumables in a world that will enthusiastically kill you, you can at least look forward to some of the best presentation values this year with admirable PC performance to boot.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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