Crimson Desert

Crimson Desert offers a vast and visually stunning open world, full of freedom and exploration, but its simplistic story and unclear objectives may frustrate many players.

A massive game with a beautiful, engaging, and highly interactive world that is a joy to explore. It impresses with sheer content, compelling puzzles, numerous systems, and dynamic combat. However, weak boss fights, a bland story, uninspired quests, and clunky controls and UI leave noticeable blemishes on the overall experience.

Crimson Desert is not a game that leaves you indifferent. It’s certainly not a masterpiece of the genre, nor is it a complete disaster. It shows as much potential as it does flaws. The game doesn’t set any new standards, but those who were expecting a grand, long-lasting adventure can set off for Pywel confident they’ll find what they’re looking for.

Crimson Desert is undoubtedly an original and ambitious game, but at the same time it feels a bit like a soup with too many ingredients thrown in. On one hand, it offers an intriguing world where almost every hour of play can bring something new; on the other, it overwhelms with an excess of mechanics you constantly have to learn, often without much guidance. When you take a closer look at its gameplay systems, you’ll notice plenty of missteps, yet despite them it’s hard to remain indifferent to this game. If you can accept its flaws and invest a good amount of time and attention, you’ll likely get hooked just like I did - discovering an adventure on a scale beyond anything we’ve seen in video games so far.

Crimson Desert is a frequently thrilling game, elevated by an open world well worth exploring and hard-hitting combat that delights with its depth and emphasis on player expression. It might not always be the most cohesive game, mixing high fantasy with steampunk and sci-fi elements, but there's nothing else quite like it, and I can't help but be impressed by how little restraint Pearl Abyss has shown in its commitment to delightful absurdity. In some respects, Crimson Desert might not be too good to be true, but it's a world worth getting lost in.

Crimson Desert is a game of extremes. At its best, it offers a breathtaking world filled with meaningful exploration, impressive scale, and genuinely thrilling battles. However, that brilliance is occasionally weighed down by an overabundance of unfocused systems, a weak narrative, and combat that struggles to maintain consistency.

You have to admire its ambition, and there are high points, but there's also a lot of slogging around and meaningless fetch quests.

Crimson Desert is a demanding, complex RPG that can feel punishing and occasionally unfair, especially without constant progression. Yet it offers a breathtaking open world with unmatched scale and depth. Its reception will vary widely—frustrating for some, but deeply rewarding for those willing to fully invest.

Crimson Desert is an ambitious open-world game that buckles under its own weight, making it a fun but flawed experience that will leave the player base divided.

[Crimson Desert is] a beautiful, exploration-rich open-world game that’s a clear technological achievement, hampered by a cornucopia of little frustrations and a stark lack of narrative depth.

Crimson Desert’s best moments come when you think about the game it could have been, were it not for its overabundance of clunky mechanics and its painfully sluggish controls. Riddled with glitches and systems that don’t work, Pearl Abyss’s first single-player game can rely on its sublime open world, or its core management system borrowed from BDO, to occasionally lift us out of our frustration.

There are so many moments of discovery and bizarre flourishes in this vast open world, but they’re obscured by obtuse design and an absence of narrative depth.

There’s no denying that Crimson Desert is a massively ambitious game. Bringing together the most inventive parts of Breath Of The Wild, The Witcher, Elden Ring and a dozen more fantasy games means you can still be surprised after sinking hundreds of hours into exploring the beautiful, varied land of Pailune. However, trying to cram so many different mechanics into a game that also offers players total freedom means it often feels a bit hollow.

Crimson Desert is an extremely ambitious open-world adventure, and that ambition is what makes it both incredibly cool and gobsmackingly infuriating in almost equal measure. I had some memorable times exploring this gorgeous world, discovering weird minigames and killing bandits along the way. But those memories were also marred by moments I’d rather forget, like the tedious combat encounters, unintuitive puzzles, awful story, and substantial bugs. There’s lots to love about this quirky, kitchen sink design, and I admire that it’s managed to pack a metric ton of unique mechanics and interesting areas into one package. But it takes work to dig your way through the thick layer of gunk that covers it all, and the mostly competent action-adventure game that’s buried beneath is only sometimes worth that effort.

As an open world game Crimson Desert feels like next gen, but lame story telling makes it feel quite hollow.

A bizarre mishmash of disparate gameplay elements, with absolutely no sense of coherent design or narrative… and yet its stunning game world is still a fascinating mess to explore.

Chaotic, frustrating, but undeniably ambitious. Crimson Desert constantly tests our patience with technical problems and a confusing narrative, before letting us enjoy its ambitious combat system, exploration and stunning visuals. A game that demands time and a lot of patience for those who manage to overcome the barrier of its lack of polish.

The balance, in particular, isn’t quite right yet. We certainly applaud the fact that the game doesn’t hold your hand, but the contrast is quite stark. In some missions, everything is so broken down and spoon-fed to you that the game guides you through every step like a toddler. And at other times, you have absolutely no idea—and absolutely no explanation—of what you’re supposed to do. The lack of narrative and coherence is clearly a shortcoming. Despite all its flaws, there’s definitely the potential for a fantastic game here. It never becomes as emotionally compelling as Arthur Morgan’s story in Red Dead Redemption 2, and it lacks that childlike wonder of Breath of the Wild, but it all looks great and the massive amount of content makes up for a lot. Crimson Desert is a rough diamond that still needs a good polish. In its current form, it’s an okay game with obvious limitations. With enough post-launch support, it might still achieve what it sets out to do: become one of the better games of the year.

As it stands on release, the best parts of Crimson Desert are buried deep under layers of absurdity.

Crimson Desert is huge, and it's beautiful, but it can't pull itself out of the bog standard narrative trenches. Combat feels clunky, especially when facing off against one of the many frustrating bosses, and there feels like there is little reward for exploration. I wanted to like this, but it left me feeling empty.

A vast world and even vaster array of MMO-like activities mix with glittering fidelity in Crimson Desert, but what good is it without much character, texture or charm?

Crimson Desert is an entertaining open-world action RPG that offers a unique gameplay experience and, thanks to its vast scale, keeps you occupied for a long time, but fails to truly impress in almost every respect. In this case, less would have been more.

Crimson Desert is massive and visually stunning, but to truly enjoy its game world, you’ll have to be willing to make some compromises. The controls take more than a little getting used to and can be a real pain at times, whether you’re using a gamepad or a mouse and keyboard. The quest design and gameplay guidance are among the worst I’ve experienced in a long time. The story leaves me completely cold, the characters spark zero interest, and while Crimson Desert strives for immersion with its detailed, vibrant world, high-quality animations, and many features, it repeatedly undermines that immersion itself.

Proving that looks aren’t everything, Crimson Desert’s stunning visuals and strong performances aren’t enough to save it from being a disappointing experience. Jam-packed with content and systems that make it feel like a Jack of all features, master of none with an unenjoyable gameplay loop, Crimson Desert is really just a single-player MMORPG in all but name.

For players to get more out of this world, Crimson Desert requires a greater sense of purpose - a reason to remain invested in persevering through its most testing moments, to press on for hours in the faith that it will attain some kind of shape. [Issue#423, p.98]

I admire Pearl Abyss’ quick response to some of Crimson Desert’s issues, and I think there’s a real chance that it will eventually feel decent to play. At the moment, though, it simply doesn’t, and even with updates, I have my doubts that it will ever give me a world that’s engaging for anything more than its impressive visuals. There’s a lot to do in Crimson Desert, but so little that I actually wanted to do.

Crimson Desert is a gorgeous audiovisual experience with obtuse mechanics, poor mission design, and a nonexistent story. It plays like an MMO trapped in the frame of a single-player adventure game with too many cooks in the kitchen.

Crimson Desert is an exercise in excess, and it is worse for it. If you believe more is always better and are so enraptured by “world big” that you are willing to overlook substantial, glaring flaws (and there are many), you’ll love Crimson Desert. Perhaps the most damning thing I can say about Crimson Desert is that it is an enormous game with a ton of content, and I spent most of my time with it wishing I was doing anything else.