Our early verdict on Crimson Desert: bad bugs, great cats, and an open world that could use a big bucket of yellow paint

Reviews of Crimson Desert, the new open world fantasy RPG from Black Desert Online studio Pearl Abyss, are surfacing across the internet as you read these words. Out on 19th March, it’s the story of Kliff McDuff of the Greymanes, who is trying to rally his scattered comrades following a vicious attack by their rivals, the Black Bears. It’s one of those Much-Anticipated games, possibly because it appears to have inhaled the entire third-person action genre, with mechanics that range from sorcerous air-hopping through momentum-based damage to Dynasty Warriors-style crowd control. Predictably, this glut of ideas can feel a smidge… inelegant and unwieldy.

Alas, we here at Rock Paper Shotgun don’t have a review for you, because life is short and Crimson Desert is very, very long and we only had one code to go around. Instead, we locked the guides writers in a room with the game and only allowed them to emerge once the screaming had reached a certain pitch, somewhere between the howling of Stukas and the mating calls of bats. The results of that process are below… but first, some slightly less frenzied opening impressions from myself and James.

James: I haven’t played as much as the guides gang but I don’t think I’ll be carrying on once my Giving Opinions on Hardware Shit obligations are fulfilled. The sense of rollicking fun that the 2023 trailer promised – all drifting horses, explosive skydiving, and generally Just Cause-ish sandbox kineticism – feels, at best, like it’s hours away from being realised. Or, rather, hidden behind hours of contextless loredumps and unsatisfyingly floaty fights.

It’s also a bit of a UX nightmare, perhaps best illustrated by the process for mounting your horse: you call it, it trots up from behind at a pace that’s just slightly too fast for you to match while walking, and then once you’ve caught up, the button prompt is the same as the one for environmental interactions, so instead of mounting up you bend down and scoop up a handful of lavender. I do enjoy going for a gallop around Crimson Desert’s busy forests (and crimson deserts), but this mainly just means that I’ve acquired an awful lot of lavender.

Edwin: I have an automatic fondness for Crimson Desert as a sweaty and excitable Maximum Game, an inflated double-A production that aims to accommodate every last daft idea on the whiteboard, without regard for deftness or coherence. Between the gliding and the telekinesis, the pile-drivers and the artillery strikes, there is a lot here with which to Tailor Your Playstyle. I sense mixing it all together in battle could be entertaining, once I’m over the intro hump.

Still, I cannot sanction the finicky control scheme, save as a vehicle for unintended comedy. Picking up an object should not be a four-step process in any game that wants to be some kind of action-adventure.

Jeremy: My experience with Crimson Desert did not start well. After booting it up, I became stuck in a loading screen filled with magical voxel cubes whizzing past me. This monotony went on for over a minute, making me feel like I was back in 1999, waiting ages for a loading bar to fill up. Except Crimson Desert contains no such loading bar, no indication at all of what’s going on under the hood. Thinking that something was surely going wrong, I Alt +F4ed out of the game. When I tried it again, I loaded in significantly less time.

I’m not sure what went wrong here. First time startup issues, or perhaps my hardware is just getting on in years? That said, this experience is emblematic of the unexplained facets and bizarre bugs within Crimson Desert. Elements that should be intuitive and a no-brainer, like sheathing my sword or jumping atop platforms, take far too long to perform because the game has deliberately chosen to underexplain its interface, and seems to delight in obtuse button mapping.

Little tasks in the first area, including sweeping a chimney for some NPCs or rotating stone slabs to open a door, become an exercise in frustration as I grapple with a fidgety targeting system that does not want to obey me. Moments that should be full of wonder – like gaining the ability to fly and sailing downwards as a truly expansive map opens beneath me – end with a janky concussion. (In the case of flying, when my main dude Kliff landed on the ground, I got stuck for 30 seconds in a texture that hadn’t properly loaded.)

I suppose I should be glad that I can run this game at all, because it’s either crashed or simply won’t boot for multiple others. But technical issues aside, as an open world RPG experience, it features a beautiful setting smothered by an unspectacular story and far too many systems under the hood.

These include a skill tree with dozens of abilities that you need to figure out on your own with no guidance whatsoever, magical tech puzzles ripped right from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (but signposted in a poorer fashion), and tonnes of unnecessary fluff that drove guides writers across Gamer Network into confoundment. (Legendary Animals you can hunt, discovered at the 100th hour mark? Sure, why not.) I guess the combat is fun, but players looking for a Soulslike will probably be disappointed, as Crimson Desert’s more of a Character Action Game than anything else – and one that doesn’t explain what half of its skills do.

Maybe some will like this, but to me, Crimson Desert – which originally began as a prequel to Pearl Abyss’ Black Desert Online – feels like the devs wanted to make a Witcher-esque single player game, but their only experience was in overcomplicated MMOs. The final result is a product exploding at the waist with far too much stuff and an irritating tendency to avoid communicating anything to the player. Yes, it is a gorgeous looker, but it’s spent all of its time being pretty, and not enough time giving me the visual feedback I need to pass a block-manoeuvring puzzle.

In short, this is a game that could actually benefit from yellow paint.

Ollie: I can see how people would find Crimson Desert fun, if they could look past all the things that I cannot look past. The stilted dialogue. The floaty, janky combat. The fact that bosses will stunlock you into oblivion, or attack you while you’re reviving so that you’re insta-killed again. The absolute clusterfuck of a control scheme behind almost everything you do. The horridly lazy way that quests give you markers to find without any setup whatsoever. The fact that I haven’t cared so little for a protagonist or the woes of their world since Borderlands 3.

Crimson Desert is ludicrously overstuffed with mechanics and systems, a scant few of which are really quite excellent (picking up cats and catapulting off trees are the highlights), but the rest of which feel half-baked. And they’re the ones that you spend all your time with. Believe me, I want to like the game. It would certainly make my job easier. But alas, I had a better time playing Starfield.

Callum: Having read the above, you guys have my bitter little sentiments all covered. I can’t be bothered to expand past “Crimson Desert feels like finding out what your mum means when you ask if you can have [insert game], and she tells you we have [insert game] at home”, but over and over for an unspeakable amount of hours. Put that on the box art.