Crimson Desert Review (PS5)

In response to an aggressive post-release patching schedule from dev Pearl Abyss, we’re giving Crimson Desert a second shake.

With the game transformed from its 19th March release date, we felt it was important to revisit the title and provide an updated assessment of the open world adventure as it exists today.

Read on for our thoughts.

As regular readers may know, I've already reviewed Crimson Desert. I blasted through the game — which is stupidly big — and I wasn't a huge fan. This was back near its launch on the 19th March.

So why am I re-reviewing Crimson Desert? Well, I've been dipping back in for weeks now, primarily because it's become a significantly improved experience.

Developer Pearl Abyss has delivered a number of major updates that have, in places, bettered the title on a fundamental quality-of-life level.

Difficulty settings have been added, menus have been massively streamlined, tutorials have been refined, input responsiveness has been fixed, and visuals have been enhanced. A bunch of progress-blocking bugs have been squashed as well.

We'd be here all day if I went on to list every improvement, so here's a quick summary: Crimson Desert is now a much easier game to actually sit down and play, without having to jump through an ungodly number of unnecessary hoops.

For the record, I stand by my criticisms from the original review. I still think the initial release had all the hallmarks of something arriving in early access, and I still think it suffers from a slew of bafflingly awkward design decisions.

But, I do 'get' Crimson Desert a lot better now I've been able to experience it unencumbered. I get why people in the comments were raving about being 200 hours in, but they hadn't even left the first area. This is a fantasy adventure that will consume you if you let it — it can be like a second life in ways that few other single player titles would dare.

It's often overwhelming and utterly unapologetic in how it's structured — even when taking all of the aforementioned improvements into account.

This is a truly colossal open world; I've now sank over 100 hours into the experience, and despite having finished the main story a while back, there are still whole swathes of the map that remain fogged over.

Let's start from the top. The game's disjointed opening remains a sticking point, even on a second run. It does very little to tie quest objectives together from a narrative perspective — something that remains an issue throughout the campaign — but ultimately, you're not playing Crimson Desert for the story.

It is a shame, though. There are traces of a half-decent plot sprinkled about the main questline, especially when things get political.

Playing as the leader of the Greymanes — a band of hearty mercenaries from the land's northern reaches — you're tasked with rebuilding your once great clan after its destruction at the hands of the Black Bear barbarians.

In order to do this, protagonist Kliff and his ragtag allies must endear themselves to the powers that be. You take on dangerous jobs for local lords, spilling bandit blood and reclaiming lost locations. It's satisfying to see the Greymanes gradually return to their rightful place at the top of the food chain.

The problem is that outside of a handful of main missions, the personalities and motivations of Kliff and the gang are barely explored. Dialogue scenes are frustratingly stunted and feel cobbled together against a backdrop of vague exposition.

It also doesn't help that individual narrative threads refuse to cross paths until much later in the story. Most notably, Kliff is actually killed during the prologue, but he's revived by a kind of demigod who offers next to no explanation.

Kliff avoids mentioning this to anyone — even his closest allies — and they go about their business as usual, despite the fact that our hero now has access to a full range of completely alien superpowers.

It just doesn't add up, and it makes me think that much of the title's plot elements were bolted onto the game when it was already heavily in development.

Indeed, Crimson Desert is crafted from a dizzying number of moving parts. There are tens of factions each with storylines of their own, there's an entire camp management system to wrap your head around, and the sheer amount of unmarked secrets just sitting out there in the open world is staggering.

If I wanted to break down everything there is to see and do, this review would be 10,000 words long. Maybe more. I can't stress enough just how endless Crimson Desert feels, even when you're 50 to 100 hours in.

As with any memorable open world release, it's the open world itself that's the star of the show. Pywel is, in my opinion, one of the most technically impressive and immersive open worlds ever made.

In terms of attention to detail — the abundance of fauna and flora, the weather system, the dynamic lighting — it's up there with the all-timer that is Red Dead Redemption 2. And with regards to scale, the only comparisons I can think of are MMOs that have been iterated upon for several years.

It's an outstanding creation, and it's a genuine joy to simply pick a direction and start walking. The vistas alone make any trek worthwhile.

I have absolutely zero doubt that the game is at its best when you're just exploring the map at your own pace; it's not quite as awe-inspiring as Elden Ring, but it's still engrossing.

I'd go as far to say that Crimson Desert's overall quality as an open world experience is so high that its shortcomings start to stick out like a sore thumb. When you're not out there in the wilds, you're probably doing side quests — and a disappointingly large portion of them suck.

Pearl Abyss' history of Black Desert Online comes to the fore here, as Kliff spends way too much time plodding between objective markers. Fetch quests are a constant, and the characters involved almost never add any spice or interesting exposition.

It's mind-numbing filler through and through, and the only reason these quests might ever earn a pass is because you're so transfixed on the living and breathing world that surrounds them.

But there are times when it gets worse — yes, somehow worse than the most basic fetch quests you can imagine. There are quests in Crimson Desert that are so bad, I can't even begin to comprehend how they made it through playtesting.

Shockingly, the best example I can give actually occurs during the main campaign. Without spoiling anything specific, there's an entire chapter that revolves around recapturing a conquered castle.

Kliff joins up with the local militia and they hash out a plan of attack that involves using the Greymanes as shock troops. What follows is one of the greatest action sequences in the game, as you slaughter your way between enemy encampments, pushing back the invaders in a dynamic, multi-layered war that wouldn't look out of place in Dynasty Warriors.

The accompanying cutscenes are great, and it all ends with a dramatic boss fight in the castle's crumbling keep. This is what Crimson Desert should be about whenever you progress the story.

Afterwards, you hit the next chapter, full of beans, and the game understandably calms things down. You ride up north to a lovely looking village, chat to your allies, and then... you're introduced to the concept of eavesdropping.

The game has a real problem with wheeling out one-and-done gameplay mechanics that are extremely poorly implemented. Eavesdropping requires you to stand in an exact spot near a couple of NPCs, and listen through their unskippable, insanely slow conversation.

When that's done, you need to take your newfound information and present it to a local guard so you can gain access to an underground hideout. And you do this not once, not twice, but three times — and every time, you need to pick the same dialogue options and listen to the same lines, all while wondering what the hell is going on from a plot perspective.

It's like placeholder script. None of it makes sense, and the game forces you to sit through reams of it just so Kliff can meet with a guy he apparently already knows. I was ready to close the game and not come back.

Compared to the previous chapter — the one with the full-on war — it's like the game reboots to an unfinished version, and it is mind-blowing.

To be clear, this kind of cataclysmic drop in quest quality isn't common, but the fact it exists at all left me bemused.

I think Crimson Desert is just in desperate need of editing — and that's across the entire experience. You could cut hundreds of quests and activities without ever damaging its core appeal; Pearl Abyss clearly had no filter during development, and its all-in approach ends up hurting the game's momentum on an annoyingly frequent basis.

And that's pretty much my biggest criticism. If the title stuck to being a freeform open world journey — perhaps foregoing much of its storytelling in a style similar to Dragon's Dogma — then it would border on being a masterpiece.

But no, it has to try its hand at everything. It wants to be Red Dead Redemption 2 but with none of the character development. It wants to be a wartime drama but it buries the necessary pacing under hours of pointless busywork. It's never allowed to fully focus on its greatest assets.

Combat comes close to being one of those assets, too. I do think, mechanically, it could show its hand a lot sooner — it takes dozens of hours to properly open up via the skill tree and story-gated progression — but when it does click, it's rewardingly experimental.

Part hack-and-slash, part ability-spamming chaos simulator, Crimson Desert is a surprisingly tactile brawler, although the enemy variety — outside of bosses, who tend to be fantastic — leaves something to be desired.

Kliff is both a skilled swordsman and a big fan of wrestling moves, which makes for a shockingly fun, and undeniably unique, set of attacks. One minute your're performing wide-swinging great sword combos to sweep whole squads of foes aside, the next you're clotheslining a skittish archer with enough force to snap a nearby tree in half.

It's sick, and it only gets sicker the more time and effort you put in. When you eventually unlock elemental abilities and other enemy-melting moves, it's a total power trip, and some of the best moment-to-moment combat you'll find in the genre.

It can feel a little floaty, however, particularly when facing off against bosses. Visual cues aren't always as readable as they should be, and animations can appear inconsistent. This leads to some duels feeling like you're winging it and simply tanking blows, as opposed to placing your faith in well-made action mechanics.

The only other thing holding combat back is the frame rate. While battlefields need to be especially hectic for frames to fall off a cliff, the drops still distract from what is a highlight of the game.

To be fair, Pearl Abyss has worked relative wonders in getting Crimson Desert to run better on both PS5 and PS5 Pro. Recent patches have improved performance across the board to a startling degree, even if it's still not perfect. I'm hoping that further enhancements are incoming.