Crimson Desert review: Too good to be true? Not entirely

It's been a while since I've seen a game garner the levels of hype pre-launch that Crimson Desert has managed.

By way of a seemingly endless stream of new clips, developer Pearl Abyss has been barraging social media with one new mechanic after another, so much so that the de facto response now appears to be "it's too good to be true, right?"

Well, having got to grips with Crimson Desert, I can say that while on the mechanics front, Crimson Desert does what it says on the tin, that doesn't mean it's all it's all it's cracked up to be.

Crimson Desert is an action-adventure game set on the continent of Pywel. Playing as the Greymane warrior Kliff, you scour the continent for your scattered comrades, navigating warring factions and mythical forces on your path to seek your vengeance.

At this point, what most people know of Crimson Desert is that it appears to have incorporated every game mechanic under the sun.

You've got your classic melee, ranged and magic combat of any medieval action adventure, but that's supplemented by a deep skill tree that offers a huge amount of flexibility, unlocking entire new moves and combo systems.

The game also takes a fascinating approach to learning new moves, in that Kliff must see the move being performed in-game before he can learn them himself, but once you land your first RKO on a goblin, it's all worth it.

In many ways, Crimson Desert feels reminiscent of a great number of games. It feels perhaps mean to say that it rips off other titles, but in so many aspects, Crimson Desert doesn't just feel similar to other games, but effectively a total reskin.

What Pearl Abyss has done with this game is effectively combine The Witcher 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, sprinkling bits and pieces they liked from other titles in for good measure.

You have the huge open world, combat and exploration of The Witcher 3.

You have the Sky Islands, physics, and what is essentially Ultrahand from Tears of the Kingdom.

You've got a kind of lite parkour reminiscent of Assassin's Creed, character switching of GTA 5.

That's before we even get into the fact that it has mining and cooking and hammering tent pegs into the ground with a big mallet which appears to be used for one quest and then never again. Oh, and also flying on a dragon.

It's like a greatest hits album compiling all the biggest and best mechanics of the last decade or so. It feels incredibly derivative, but is pulled off so expertly that it's hard not to say "fair enough". Credit where credit's due.

Unfortunately, something else Crimson Desert has taken from Tears of the Kingdom is the almost total absence of a story.

Crimson Desert has a story, but it feels so loose and inconsequential that it's almost like Pearl Abyss made the entire game and then had to pick up a AAA action-adventure story on the way home.

While it does begin to improve the further you get into the game, it never really picks up enough to draw you in and is handily the weakest aspect of the game.

I have recently been replaying Final Fantasy 7, and while it's as excellent as ever, one of its most noticeable aspects nearly three decades on is that it tells you absolutely nothing.

This is a double-edged sword – on the one hand, at a time when many modern games insist on holding the player's hand at every turn, being forced to do a bit of thinking is a refreshing surprise.

Conversely, it can also be exceptionally annoying, in the way that so many old titles can be.

Crimson Desert dances upon this line with the same deftness, offering up such a wonderfully freeing approach to gameplay that is no stranger to that same frustration.

You are often left to your own devices, given minimal information and expected to simply figure it out.

At times, this is excellent, and I have loved properly engaging my brain to progress, but it would be a lie to say I haven't also found it frustrating at times, and I imagine that this will be one of the game's most divisive traits.

That same freedom is, however, what allows for Crimson Desert's strongest boon, which is its exploration.

Pywel is enormous. Beyond the surface-level exploration of the continent's grassy knolls, deserts and woodland, there are hidden caves, ruins and more to uncover.

The world is filled with little things to do dotted around such as bounty posters, miniquests and enemy encampments to clear.

Several previews have noted that players have spent dozens of hours in the first area alone, and had I not been beelining the story for this review, I can see how easily I would have been drawn into that situation too.

It should be said that much of this content is very light, and reminiscent of the bloat of some of the modern Assassin's Creed titles. It's there if you want it, but once the fun of exploration begins to wane, much of it comes across as filler; content for the sake of content.

Overall, Crimson Desert is an interesting game to think about.

Because of how heavily it leans towards gameplay at the expense of narrative, it feels like a game that, for the right player, could be played for thousands of hours without getting bored, while for others, it'll be one playthrough and then never picked up again, and I'm very interested to see where players end up falling on that spectrum.

But since it does lean so heavily on the gameplay side at the expense of its narrative, it's certainly not going to be for everyone.

It would not have been a surprise to see Crimson Desert crumble under the weight of its enormous size and scope, in the way that so many of the most ambitious games do.

It is therefore a hugely impressive feat that Pearl Abyss has managed to meld its many moving parts together in such a way that, far from buckling, it stands very strongly indeed.

Does Crimson Desert try and do too much? Sometimes. Can the enormous array of gameplay options feel overwhelming, or unnecessary? Certainly. It is lacking majorly in terms of narrative and character development? You betcha.

But it is a disservice to Crimson Desert to focus too heavily on these things, as all that serves to do is discredit what is otherwise a technically brilliant title.

Crimson Desert is a veritable power fantasy of a game, bringing together some of the best ideas of the last decade of gaming. But while it cribs heavily from its inspirations, it blends everything in such a way that one forgets how derivative it is, forced instead to gaze slack-jawed, in awe at this tremendous feat of game design.

Vast, ambitious, overwhelming, beautiful, thrilling, blood-pumping, flawed. There is almost no end to the words I could use to describe Crimson Desert. Boring is not one of them.

Crimson Desert releases on 19 March for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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