Crimson Desert Is a Gorgeous, Bloated Open World With Combat to Die For

The combat is the star, and it is bombastic in the truest sense: explosive, weighty, and more purely fun to execute than almost anything else in the open-world space. Kliff has an enormous, physical moveset full of grapples, environmental takedowns, and spectacular finishers, and simply wading into a camp of enemies and taking them apart is a reliable thrill for dozens of hours. There is a real tactility to it, a sense that every blow lands with force.

The world backs it up. Pywel is beautiful and vast, packed with content: the game boasts 168 main quests, over 70 unique bosses, and more than a hundred combat and exploration challenges, and players report cresting a hundred hours without uncovering half the map. There is a genuine sense of discovery to roaming it, and the quiet moments of exploration are some of the best the game has to offer.

The problem is everything that gets in the way of that. The controls try to cater to so many systems at once that they become a genuine obstacle, an overloaded scheme that is hard to remember and harder to execute cleanly under pressure. And then there are the bosses. Combat against normal enemies is excellent, but the marquee boss fights are frequently the opposite: many rely on teleportation that breaks your lock-on, sudden screen-filling attacks, and cramped arenas, producing some of the most needlessly frustrating encounters in a recent big-budget game. It is a strange, self-sabotaging design, and it undercuts what should have been the highlights.

Visually, Crimson Desert is a showcase. Pearl Abyss has poured its considerable technical muscle into a continent of dramatic vistas: storm-lashed coastlines, snow-capped peaks, sprawling battlefields, and cities rendered with dense, tactile detail. It is one of the more beautiful open worlds you can currently load up, and the sheer scale of it is genuinely impressive, with weather and lighting that regularly stop you to just look.

The character and creature animation is a big part of why the combat feels so good; Kliff moves with a physicality that sells every grab and slam, and the larger enemies are designed with real spectacle. It is a shame that spectacle so often curdles into frustration in the boss arenas, because the raw craft on display is not in doubt.

The presentation is let down mainly by its human element: cutscenes and the wooden, personality-free protagonist do the visuals no favours, and the awkward story delivery saps the drama out of moments the art direction clearly wants you to take seriously. As a technical and artistic achievement, though, the world itself is hard to fault.