Crimson Desert’s Standout Feature Is That It’s Crimson Desert

Cards on the table: I love Crimson Desert. And despite the mixed response it’s getting from critics (check out our review in progress for the official IGN take), make no mistake, there is a lot here to love. Like, a lot. Too much, arguably. Which is why our review isn’t finished yet, on top of a bunch of technical issues, difficulty spikes, and progress-stalling bugs.

Dafter than a sack of hammers and yet more moreish than the Iberian Peninsula, until now the big question hanging over Crimson Desert was “but what’s the USP?”. This enormous tapestry of Open World Tropes is all at once a love letter, a greatest hits compilation, and a Frankenstein’s Monster of that type of thing: a Dragon’s Dogma broth with heaps of The Witcher 3, Assassin’s Creed, Zelda, and even GTA 5 ladled in. Its myriad apparent inspirations are obvious to anyone with even a casual knowledge of Big Games of the last twenty or so years.

But even its most ardent detractor can’t deny that Crimson Desert marches defiantly to the beat of its own drum: though much of the pre-release coverage was preoccupied with all the things it cribs from other games in the genre, it didn’t become clear until we properly got our hands on it that, paradoxically, the end result is nothing quite like anything we’ve played before.

Underpinning Crimson Desert is a layer of friction that is quite jarring if you come to it from the focus-grouped safe havens of Sony Exclusives and Ubisoft Open Worlds, or even the CD Projekt Red stuff that retains its rough edges despite an infinite budget for polish. It’s a game of many interactions, ways to manipulate the game world that are surprising in the freedom they grant and frustrating in how fiddly they are to get working. In short: it’s insanely ambitious, but janky as hell.

The type of audience that Crimson Desert is going to attract will be split on whether it’s a flawed gem a la Dragon’s Dogma or a janky disaster-slog a la Two Worlds (or a secret third thing: both of those kicked into each other), and a lot of it will come down to the combat system, because it pulls from something that doesn’t cross over all that much with the RPG world: fighters. Brawlers. Games about walking from left to right and battering people while listening to rad techno. From when this was a real country.

Button-combo moves that require memory, patience, and impeccable timing to get the best out of. Rather than a basic Light and Heavy attack augmented with special moves, or magic that gets triggered via a radial menu or Special Button, Crimson Desert is all about the visceral immediacy of simply knowing how to pull off the cool flips rather than assigning them to a favourites bar. It is what sets it apart, and is equally what will mark it out as far too obtuse for its own good, especially once people start hitting the bosses that filter out players unable or unwilling to engage with the game on its own terms.

It doesn’t help, of course, that the boss fights are the game’s nadir. In trying to make an open system where players can organically build their own fighting style from the available moveset that should, in theory, work on any size of enemy as long as you bring enough soup, Pearl Abyss have ended up pushing out a rogues gallery of hard bastards who just aren’t all that enjoyable to engage with. Hit sponges who can easily cancel your animations, and one-shot you back to the title screen before you can reach for a thermos.

Yes, soup is one of the best healing foods in the game: relatively easy to collect the ingredients for and coming in pretty high on the benefit-cost analysis, it too represents a system that is too broad for its own good. You very quickly learn that crafting low hp food items is basically useless, and a waste of meat: low level enemies will never take enough health off you to warrant the necking of an aperitif, while the big lads scarcely give you enough time to stand there scoffing a dozen 80hp scraps of meat just to claw back enough health to survive their next uncancellable attack.

There’s so much stuff you can do that is utterly superfluous: a nest of systems that don’t fit together all that well and frankly needed a lot more trimming during development. Like everything else about this game, it’s a blend of cliches: a Too Many Cooks trope Tuvixed with the one about infinite monkeys smashing out Shakespeare.

Though I’m certain Crimson Desert had a lot of features cut during its painfully long development cycle, it feels like a cautionary tale about what happens when a studio isn’t willing to cut enough. During their production, games shed features like moulting cats. Cuts can happen for all sorts of reasons: budget, time, tech, or artistic. Being disciplined and discerning about what to bin and what to spend precious resources on is the essence of good direction, which can make the difference between 6/10 or a 9/10. I don’t want to cast aspersions onto Crimson Desert’s showrunners: there are factors at play in all creative endeavours that no outsider is privy to. But it certainly feels like a game that could do with a lot of shearing, and that’s where many of its issues stem from.

Despite all it has cribbed from other things, the game feels like it arrived here from an alternate dimension in which the modern action RPG had never been invented. A place where not just control schemes but the very language of blockbuster games is yet to be homogenised through convention. A throwback not just to Red Dead 2 and all of its Red Deadalikes, but to the turn of the century, where big ticket games were still a wild west in terms of basic things like “where is the action button and what does it do”. And so the question of what exactly it brings to the table is answered very brilliantly and boldly: Crimson Desert’s USP is that it is Crimson Desert.

And it is gorgeous, let’s not forget that. Pearl Abyss’s tech is astounding at bringing this vast, hyperreal landscape to life in a way that feels like a genuine step forward from its contemporaries. Visual splendour crammed with microdetails, particle effects, and an almost piss-taking deployment of rich, sumptuous real-time lighting that makes playing with raytracing turned off seem as compromised an experience as going to the National Gallery in a motorcycle helmet, which goes some way to explaining why we’ve barely seen it running on non-Pro consoles. So Crimson Desert doesn’t just make unruly demands of your patience; it also mocks your hardware budget.

It’s a massive gamble for a game whose reported development budget puts it well above the average Sony exclusive, which is precarious for a title that’s about as far away from a sure thing as you can get: a spin-off of a popular MMO, sure, but in a completely different genre, one that the studio has no prior expertise in delivering. And its links to Black Desert Online have, if anything, been underplayed over the last few years.

I would hazard a guess that the crossover between the kind of people who leather every waking hour into MMOs and the kind of people who crave solitary, single-player experiences is not that much. It certainly makes business sense for Pearl Abyss to chase an audience that it doesn’t have rather than cannibalising the one it does, but it does mean that “…from the makers of Black Desert Online” has limited power as a selling point in this case.

It’s absolutely fair to compare it to The Witcher 3, Red Dead, and all of the other things that Crimson Desert is clearly desperate to call daddy. But the comparisons that come to my mind while actually playing it are things like Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days, Pentiment, and yes, Dragon’s Dogma 2. Games that are unapologetically unique and committed to pursuing an artistic ideal that much of the audience will instinctively bounce off of, because to do anything else would compromise its vision. In Crimson Desert’s case, that vision is admittedly muddled, but clear enough to set itself apart.

I’m glad it exists in this form: wobbly, undiscerning, and outrageously janky, but heartbreakingly gorgeous, and so very generous. A game that is designed to be sipped over months, if not years, and is broad and wild enough that, at the very least, it will never be boring.

We’ve got plenty more on Crimson Desert, including patch notes for its day one update, IGN’s Crimson Desert Review So Far, and our launch interview with Will Powers. We’ve also got a Crimson Desert PC performance review.

And if you’re jumping into Crimson Desert’s huge open world, we recommend you take a look at our guide to Things to Do First in Crimson Desert, plus Things Crimson Desert Doesn’t Tell You (we’ve got 28 and counting!). We’ve also got a guide to the Best Early Weapons we recommend picking up, the Best Skills to Get First (including a handy explainer of the skills system), and 34 Essential Tips and Tricks to help you succeed in Pywel.