Crimson Desert Review-in-progress

Crimson Desert is the game equivalent of ordering a pizza (or ice cream sundae, if that’s more your thing) with every topping the place has. It is a wild sight to behold, and each bite you take can result in either a near-euphoric blend of flavors where everything just seems to click and enhance one another, or a cringe-inducing assault on your senses, or somewhere in between. I can’t recall another game in my nearly 38 years of life that has whiplashed me from pulse-pounding excitement to numb frustration to jaw-gaping awe all in the span of 10 heartbeats. Sitting here writing this, I’m left befuddled on how I really feel about it. I love parts. I hate parts. It does some things surprisingly well. It fumbles and drops the ball on expected fundamentals. Crimson Desert is just… a lot.

To be upfront, I haven’t beaten the story of Crimson Desert yet, and so I’m classifying this as a sort of “review-in-progress” until I manage to do so. That being said, based on what I’ve seen of the story so far, I don’t necessarily foresee the conclusion impacting things too much, but I will still refrain for the time being.

To get you caught up on the goings-on of Crimson Desert, the game opens with you as Kliff, leader of a band of respectable mercenaries known as the Greymanes, getting slaughtered by a rival group, the nefarious Black Bears (not actual black bears, just big dudes who wear bear hides on their heads). After some death, magic-y stuff, and some undetermined amount of time, Kliff sets out to get the band back together and get to the bottom of said magic-y stuff. For at least the first good portion of the story, most of your time will be spent traveling around finding Greymanes and completing odd tasks like competing in contests, getting your drunk friend out of trouble, fighting random bandits (not the ones that killed your crew, mind you), or dealing with other troubles. Besides the constant swearing of revenge by the other Greymanes, there is a surprising lack of any sort of real revenge that happens (at least for a good while, as I said, haven’t rolled credits yet).

Concerning everything else about Crimson Desert, I think you could easily turn listing its systems and mechanics and connecting them to the other games it takes them from into a party game to bust out at your nerdy get-together. You have the sky islands from Tears of the Kingdom, the climbing and assassinating from Assassin’s Creed, the dog from Fable, the massive world on par with Red Dead Redemption 2, and the ability to kill large swaths of livestock like in the Oregon Trail, and that is just scratching the surface. While the mechanics fit within the context of the world, it feels like they are all hamstrung by poor explanations, taking frustratingly long for the payoff, limitations imposed by simply not having enough buttons to do everything, or the occasional unpredictable outcomes. My dog, for instance, has been known to steal items from villagers, putting a bounty on my head. Hilarious, sure. Is it what I wanted to have happen? Not so much.

This jank isn’t helped at all by the fact that so much of what Crimson Desert has to offer takes so long to actually do. Nearly everything you have to do in the game, from talking to townsfolk, harvesting resources, picking loot off the ground, and other such mundane tasks, requires you to activate a cursor and highlight the area or object you want to interact with. Let’s take chopping down a tree for wood as an example. In theory, you should just be able to swing your sword or axe at the trunk, it falls, and ding, you got some timber. Not so in Crimson Desert. Here, you have to target the trunk with your log-chopping axe equipped (no, you can’t just swing and hit the tree), and after a few good chops, the tree will fall. From here, you will need to target the fallen tree again and whack at it with your axe a couple more times to break it apart into smaller log sections. These sections may roll away if you’re on a slope, so you may need to chase after them, and then you will have to go and target each one of these smaller logs and hack at those again before you get your prize, 2 or 3 pieces of timber. The time investment and payoff just don’t line up, and simply giving you your resources after chopping the fallen log would be fine.

There are plenty of other strange design decisions peppered throughout Crimson Desert that leave a bitter taste in my mouth whenever I play. Things such as the inability to rebind actions to different buttons on my controller (despite it being recommended to play on one), far distances between fast travel points, and a lack of being able to travel directly to cities or other frequented places, a restricted rest system that prevents you from passing time in the game, and more.

Dear reader, you will avoid the truly awful initial inventory size that reviewers dealt with, a scant 20 slots at start, now raised to 50 with a pre-launch patch. Be thankful you weren’t here to bear witness during those dark days. Pearl Abyss managed to cram so many things into Crimson Desert, but so much of it feels as though it was all built on sand, lacking a solid foundation that could allow it to reach the hints of the lofty heights of the mountains seen in the far-off distance as I played. And if you are someone who finds modern games to be too hand-holdy or clear with what to do, well, take pleasure in knowing that Crimson Desert can be as clear at times as if someone were reciting Shakespeare to you in Latin, and then kicking you in the shin for some reason.

So many of my feelings about Crimson Desert are a jumbled mess, and I’m trying really hard not to have it spew forth onto the page as an incoherent loon. What makes it such a mess, though, is that even with all my issues with it, I kind of actually like it? This is a damn gorgeous game with some of the most impressive draw distance tech I've ever seen. Watching the rain fall and bounce off Kliff’s cloak as I slink through the darkness, lit only by a camp’s lanterns before quietly taking care of a nearby guard, gave me shivers, and I could almost feel the cold as I trudged through the deep snow of the Argent Peaks, leaving a trail as I went. More than a few times, I found myself simply leaning back in my chair and admiring the view from the top of the latest rock formation I climbed, reflecting on how good games can look these days.

The most fun I have had in Crimson Desert came from these sorts of moments; those naturally occurring moments that happened outside of the story. Just exploring the countryside and forests, stumbling on bandits and then laying them out with a sick clothesline or tackling outlaws I’ve tracked down and dragging them back to the jail for a reward. Learning a new move in the shockingly deep combat system that I could add to my combos. Moves like the aforementioned clothesline or the “totally not Rider Kick” Flying Kick, all sorts of fun and silly moves that you wouldn’t expect in your typical high fantasy game. It’s neat seeing my camp grow and expand while deploying my forces to take out entrenched bandits at a nearby fort, or customizing my Kliff to look cool is fun. Even investing in the banking system and just watching my money increase is rather satisfying, though playing thief and fencing the occasional wagon is more profitable. After sinking so much time into the PC version, all I want to do is lounge on my couch and play this on my PlayStation 5 Pro and relax—especially after the Digital Foundry breakdown—just living in this world a bit.

This game is not greater than the sum of its parts; it is a chimera-like beast with the heads of Link, Ezio, and a host of others all thrashing out. Still, it is a sort of spectacle all the same that people will be talking about for a good time to come, I think. This is a game that needs work, and I hope that post-launch patches address those pain points that I can just see folks having in the days and weeks to come, but just like a Red Dead Redemption or a Skyrim, Crimson Desert is going to be best served when you just take your time and do your own thing. Hopefully, my thoughts will be more settled and coherent by the time the credits roll.