Crimson Desert review: "Take time to leave the beaten path and you'll find a game that's far better as a sandbox than as a story"

Crimson Desert is proof that excess and maximalism can be awe-inspiring and wondrous… Or it can just as easily be overstimulating and leave you feeling detached from what's before you. Crimson Desert is forever trying to straddle that line, with results sometimes stunning and sometimes numbing, as it presents an open world fantasy action RPG of humungous scale and depth, one clearly inspired by a multitude of RPGs from the past decade.

The result is as spectacular as it is exhausting, and dozens of hours in, I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. Perhaps that's why the end result is a game with a litany of problems, but one I keep coming back to nonetheless – in a buffet this big, there's bound to be something to everybody's taste.

Overabundance in the Desert

Crimson Desert is a swords-and-sorcery fantasy following a lost warrior commander, Kliff, trying to get the band back together for one last massacre. What makes it noteworthy is that its setting, the land of Pywel, is chock-a-block with side activities, diverse mechanics and general content – a game so broad in scope and scale as to be intimidating.

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It really is endless. Cattle rustling. Investment banking. Dye manufacture. Civil infrastructure. Mining. Bounty hunting. Mech piloting. Sumo wrestling. Import and exports. Card hustling. Puzzle solving. Interior design. Bug catching. Business management. Siege artillery. Detective work. Cookbook collecting. Carrying live porcupines to mountaintops, just because you can! That is not even close to a full accounting of everything you can do in Crimson Desert's massive open world, which is somehow both fiercely ambitious and timidly conventional. It's stuffed with ideas to the point of excess, but only those proven and tested by games that came before. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Witcher 3, Dragon's Dogma, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, God of War 2018, Red Dead Redemption 2 and more besides are all visible in Crimson Desert's ancestry. I can certainly think of worse influences.

But of all of those, The Witcher and Zelda have the biggest presence. Much of the puzzle and traversal systems feel lifted from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom (including puzzling peninsulas of sky islands), while The Witcher 3 lends a gruff tone, roly-poly combat, and a "less is not necessarily more" mindset for side content.

These are fine jumping-off points as inspirations go, and occasionally Crimson Desert does step out of its forebears' shadows in interesting ways. Combat against large groups is where the game shines most, especially when you start unlocking various grapples and wrestling techniques. I'd barrel into an enemy camp, suplex a startled guard along the way, then snatch a second cutthroat by the scruff and sling him overarm into a watchtower with enough force to actually bring it crashing down, the archer atop it screaming as he plummets into a nearby shrub. Then I'd draw swords and barrel towards the dizzied survivors, cutting through them like cheese wire.

So that's all excellent, no notes there. The problems arise in nuance – specifically, a lack of discipline in much of the design. Breath of the Wild and The Witcher 3, for example, were masterpieces not just because they were so big, but because they were also highly refined, nearly every element so obviously considered, tested, and removed if it didn't serve the greater whole.

Fantasy meets reality

Crimson Desert is not always so elegant, even if it can match its inspirations for budget and particle effects. Boss fights, which range from brawls against Crow mages to skirmishes against enraged cubes, are wildly inconsistent in challenge and it never feels like regular combat has been training you for these outrageous difficulty spikes. Your inventory is far too small and finicky for all the crafting items, ingredients and spare ammo you're encouraged to carry, and you don't even get a stash at your base to drop off loot you don't currently need, leading to constant "your inventory is full" frustrations. The camera is prone to misbehaving, which can be lethal in combat, and you have to brute force your way through many of the challenges by just spamming healing items – hardly thrilling. Meanwhile, failing a platforming challenge can often mean several minutes just trying to get back to the start, which is less stimulating and more "I'm going to kick my TV in half".

So much of what Crimson Desert does should be amazing (and often is), only to be hampered by frustration borne of sloppy design. Abilities can be unlocked before you even have the stamina or mana to use them, so that's an upgrade point wasted until ten hours later. Mechanics are poorly explained and often forgotten about for long stretches, like a bag of holding you're given but never told how to open. New playable characters are unlocked (add GTA 5 to that list of inspirations) but don't integrate meaningfully into the game, especially when they either show up too late or lack essential powers needed for puzzles or exploration. Crimson Desert can never be a true masterpiece while it's perpetually hampered by the background static of minor irritations.

But sometimes I can see the vision past that static, and in those moments of clarity, it feels like a completely different game. Crimson Desert's world is both massive and visually spectacular, whether it's mountain vistas sparkling with fresh snow, flying islands thrumming with ancient technology, or the reddened sands and sunburnt wastes for which the game is named. And it's not just a backdrop, there's real effort made into making the world of Pywel feel active and dynamic. I've seen stags butting horns and hawks plucking live salmon from rushing streams, all in-engine and out of cutscene. This world feels alive! Well, at least until you start meeting the humans and named characters.

Picaresque or patchwork?

So what's the narrative holding all this together? Our hero is Kliff, leader of "The Greymanes", a platoon of soldiers attacked by a group of burly villains in the game's intro – for reasons that are impenetrable if you're not reading the in-game glossary every couple of minutes. Kliff gets the requisite near-death experience where he is mortally wounded and saved by a friendly local, and must reassemble his team of hired goons and retake his homeland, with occasional divergences where he is kidnapped by poorly-explained wizard gods and bestowed arcane superpowers.

While Crimson Desert's gameplay is solid if sloppy, its plot isn't even that. Understanding what's happening requires quite a lot of work, and never feels worth the effort to do so. Problems arise, are resolved, and never brought up again. Characters are one-dimensional and never rise above their flattened archetypes. Worldbuilding inconsistencies and flat dialogue give towns the tone of a theme park rather than anything believable. The tone is meant to be gritty and grounded, but the writing itself is juvenile and shallow, leading to disjointed shifts in mood. One major boss goes unseen, unnamed and unexplained until the very encounter where you kill him!

It might be better if our hero were more inspiring. Kliff is a frustratingly incurious protagonist, an appropriately stone-faced sword-for-brains who has almost no interest in what's around him beyond its most pragmatic and immediate function. When summoned to a higher plane to consult with a godly being in a cosmic library filled with all the secrets of the universe, all Kliff thinks to ask is what ol' beardy wants, as though he fully understands he's just talking to a questgiver and wants to skip forward. There's no sense of relatable humanity either – when told to dive off a flying island to test a new flight power, our hero shows no fear when falling, no sense of wonder when it turns out that he can fly, no skepticism at the idea of being told to dive into oblivion. If he's not interested in this world, I can't help but wonder why I'm supposed to be.

Pywel's that ends well

My initial feelings with Crimson Desert were not great. The story was losing me, the mechanics felt sloppy, and a spate of bullying boss fights had made it all very tiresome. But over time my feelings began to change. Now, over eighty hours in, I'm genuinely looking forward to each fresh play session. I know, I know – "it gets good if you invest a working fortnight" is weak praise, but it's still true. It does get better!

Part of that comes from understanding the game well enough to navigate its flaws. Certain powers aren't worth the upgrades, there are swathes of tedious side activities, a story that you can comfortably fast forward through, and some poorly-balanced bosses that I endured rather than savored.

But beyond that, there is real charm. After a while, you realize you can just leave it all behind, go riding into the horizon and see what meets you there. Out on the road, I encountered a living diving suit, a walking tree, a castle full of baby dragons and a network of celestial teleporters, all more intriguing than anything in the main campaign. I'm constantly a bit poor, but never so cash-strapped that it feels frustrating, which I like. The puzzles can be truly mentally stimulating, so I can feel smug about solving them. And god damn, is that world pretty. The simple act of travelling makes me want to break into Photo Mode every ten minutes.

So yes, I recommend Crimson Desert, assuming you want a game the size of five other games combined, and are willing to overlook the occasional mechanical misstep and dull story. At its peak, Crimson Desert is legitimately enthralling – and that's what's stuck with me more than anything else.