Crimson Desert Review: A Contender for the Game of the Year 2026?

Crimson Desert is a game whose very existence is hard to believe — literally. Having grown out of a prequel to the Korean MMO Black Desert Online, this single-player action-adventure with enormous freedom of choice and an unbelievably vast open world instantly captured the imagination of a huge audience from the very first announcement. Honestly, we were skeptical about the developers’ promises and found it hard to trust all the teasers and trailers that Pearl Abyss released year after year.

And now, we finally got to play Crimson Desert with our own hands… and you know what? This game is real. It’s not a fake, not AI-generated slop, and not a scam like The Day Before. It’s truly one of the most ambitious games of the past five years, one that’s physically impossible to complete quickly or to experience all its content in a short time. We tried to see as much as possible of what Crimson Desert has to offer to give you a comprehensive picture of the project, and to answer two main questions: what is it really like, and who is it made for?

While playing Crimson Desert, we couldn’t shake the feeling that the creators, having shifted the game from MMO rails to single-player, decided to cram in everything cool from open-world projects with over 90 points on Metacritic. The phrase “oh, we’ve seen this in such-and-such game” left our lips almost every five minutes after a new feature was introduced. Of course, Pearl Abyss’s new game most closely resembles Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom — not just in the logic and structure of its open world, but also in its gameplay mechanics. However, it also incorporates plenty of features from other, no less iconic projects, which we’ll mention as we go through the article.

Crimson Desert’s similarity to Breath of the Wild begins literally with the story prologue, where, without any introductory cutscene, you’re thrown into a small location where you have to learn the basic mechanics as the story kicks off. The storyline itself, however, is not the project’s strongest suit. It’s far from The Witcher 3 with its multifaceted characters and excellent side quests, and even further from Kingdom Come with its Hollywood-level production and special attention to detail. Of course, Pearl Abyss tried to add as many cool cutscenes and set pieces as possible so that the player constantly feels the scale and grandeur of what’s happening, but personally, we never managed to get truly invested in Crimson Desert’s story.

The game features an excessively drawn-out introduction that, subjectively, felt longer than the entirety of the recent Resident Evil Requiem. The main character, named Clive, along with his squad of warriors from the Greymanes faction, falls into an ambush set by a rival clan. In the course of a brutal battle, he loses part of his team and ends up dying in the most horrific way possible. Yes, Pearl Abyss clearly took inspiration for the intro from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Elden Ring, but the subsequent narrative is drastically different from Hidetaka Miyazaki’s projects — both in tone and in the string of coincidences. Essentially, the protagonist is resurrected by an order of wizard-alchemists who see nobility in him and grant him a whole array of abilities, enabling him to rebuild his clan and restore peace to the continent.

The main plot of Crimson Desert unfolds extremely slowly and quickly starts to feel tedious due to its length. The narrative is reminiscent of a typical MMO, where most of the time the player is doing anything but saving the world or participating in global events. Of course, after a massive amount of time, the story picks up and turns into something between Final Fantasy and Game of Thrones, but anyone looking for a narrative adventure in Crimson Desert will have to literally endure until that point.

It seems the developers tried to replicate the unhurried pace of Red Dead Redemption 2 and thoroughly flesh out every faction vying for power. Surprisingly, the production values are very high: expensive cutscenes, decent voice acting, and several conflicts with plot twists — everything you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a Korean studio. However, the character dialogues are still awkwardly written. Perhaps this is a translation issue, since the game was originally developed in Korean: in Crimson Desert, characters talk like default NPCs from early-2000s shooters. Additionally, there are plenty of sighs after every action, excessive emotionality, and other standard Asian directing clichés.

The side quests, of which there are countless, are also inconsistent. Some are quite engaging and interesting, while others are the standard MMO fillers like “fetch this,” “gather resources,” and “clear out a bandit camp.” Despite the grim introduction and harsh setting, Crimson Desert contains plenty of humor and amusing quests reminiscent of The Witcher 3 and Kingdom Come. Thanks to these missions, the game world feels more lively and multifaceted. Unlike many other projects in this genre, there’s always something to do here. Quests, mini-games, and additional tasks are literally everywhere. Because of this rich content, it’s easy to forget about the main story and all sides of the conflict, spending dozens of hours on solid mini-stories.

At the same time, it’s important to understand that Crimson Desert is not a large-scale RPG with dozens of branching paths and side quests that affect the story. Structurally, it’s more similar to Dragon's Dogma 2, but with a linear narrative in the style of Final Fantasy. And, to be honest, that’s probably for the best. If a game of this scale also had a nonlinear story with dozens of endings and branches, it wouldn’t be released for another ten years.

The gameplay of Crimson Desert is the embodiment of what millions of gamers have dreamed of when imagining the perfect game in their minds. Believe us, we could hardly believe that the developers would be able to deliver on all their promises within a single project, but they really pulled it off. You are given a huge — no, gigantic — open world filled with incredible content and variety. On top of that, you get a dozen gameplay mechanics directly borrowed from the best modern titles.

The open world turned out to be very lively and memorable. Cities are filled with crowds of people with unique appearances, cool animations, and hundreds of small mini-scenes that bring the setting to life. In the first hours, you just wander the streets, talk to people like in Red Dead Redemption 2, and take part in small activities just to get used to the scale of Crimson Desert. After the “dead” cities of Ubisoft and the static locations of many big-budget RPGs, this game truly feels — let us repeat — alive! The last time we saw something like this was only in Rockstar Games projects and the recent Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Although in the latter, the world is more static due to gameplay conventions. Perhaps the open world most closely resembles the early Gothic games — and that’s really cool!

When, according to the story, you pass through an airborne trial course, you get to see the entire map for the first time—with its various biomes, cities, tiny settlements, mountain ranges, and dense forests. The sight is breathtaking. All this territory is available for exploration, and it will literally consume your free time if you truly want to complete Crimson Desert 100%. Fortunately, you can travel across this vast world not only on horseback, but also on dragons and other mythical creatures you can unlock.

In addition to mini-quests and side missions, the open world offers dozens of ways to entertain yourself. There’s the classic criminal hunt, where you first pick up a wanted poster, then study the description, find the location based on clues, and track down the villain. If you put off the search for too long, the criminal will move somewhere else, and you’ll have to hunt them down all over again. There are also a huge number of mini-games, including arm wrestling, archery, gambling, and so on.

There are so many gameplay mechanics that it’s dizzying. No joke, we’ve never seen a project more overloaded with features. In the entire first act, something new is constantly being introduced, turning the controls into a real piano. There’s Assassin's Creed-style parkour, allowing you to climb any building; survival game-style crafting with tree felling and ore mining; hunting animals; all sorts of item collecting; interacting with the environment, which, by the way, is destructible; and, of course, fishing and hunting. Listing everything would take several paragraphs, so just take our word for it: there’s something for everyone to do in this game.

The main character discovers this world alongside you, gaining new abilities, learning various details, and picking up quests. Just like in extraction shooters, he has to examine a new item first to understand what it is and what it’s for. Every new discovery and piece of knowledge is added to the codex, which is almost intimidating to open — it’s literally overflowing with tons of information. It’s hard to imagine how much time the developers spent meticulously describing everything in the game.

And we haven’t even touched on the gameplay ideas from Tears of the Kingdom, which the developers also carefully brought into Crimson Desert. Puzzle dungeons, playing with physics and elemental damage — including fire and water — and abilities that let you interact with the environment — all of this is fully implemented and constantly used in the open world. Just like Link, the protagonist can glide above the ground, but he also has to keep an eye on his stamina during battles and when climbing walls. In the first ten hours, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is a realistic version of The Legend of Zelda that Nintendo would never dare to make.

However, this huge variety of mechanics and gameplay comes with a downside: Crimson Desert feels too overloaded and difficult to master. Its game design is uneven, and the early chapters don’t really help you get to grips with all the features you’ll need later on. It’s literally hard to get used to the project and simply learn all the controls. One minute you’re being taught how to use an axe, then you’re handed a mask and told you can now rob civilians, and ten minutes later you’re moving objects with a mystical hand and fishing. The developers themselves strongly recommend playing with a gamepad because of the overloaded controls, but even that doesn’t help — you’ll still be confused all the time.

It’s clear that the creators of Crimson Desert cared more about content than about convenience and comfortable gameplay. The menu is one of the worst we’ve seen in games. The radial menus don’t work properly, and it’s not always possible to select the item you need on the first try. Playing on keyboard is even harder. To pick up an axe for chopping wood, you need to press F1, then select hands with the mouse, and scroll the wheel to grab the item. The map and inventory open slowly — and it’s annoying. The game itself is slow-paced, and you have to spend extra time on basic functions that shouldn’t be drawing so much attention to themselves.

There’s no sense of system or structure like in The Elder Scrolls series, and an unprepared player might have a panic attack from everything being thrown at them. Even after mastering the basics, you’ll still have to learn to manage your camp, keep track of resources, and somehow follow the story at the same time. This isn’t the kind of game you can binge in a few days, nor is it one you can slowly play through one session a week. No matter how independent Crimson Desert tries to be, its core is closely tied to MMO concepts, where the player doesn’t just have fun, but lives inside the game.

Does the lack of structure make Crimson Desert a bad game? Of course not. Despite all the pain and clunkiness in navigation, you get a lot of enjoyment from exploring the open world and dungeons. The project constantly throws something new at you and offers unique situations, never letting you get bored or start nitpicking the game design. In all the time we’ve spent in the game, we’ve barely seen even 20% of all the content it has to offer. And while you’re reading this, we’re still exploring the open world, visiting new biomes, and discovering new mechanics so we can eventually compile a complete list of everything in the game for our guides. But even what we’ve already seen is enough to call Crimson Desert one of the most ambitious games in the industry.

Despite its well-designed open world and the huge number of mechanics for interacting with it, Crimson Desert is, first and foremost, an action-adventure where combat takes center stage. In the first few hours, the combat system clearly reminded us of The Witcher 3 and didn’t seem simple at all. The protagonist strikes enemies swiftly, parries attacks quickly, dodges effectively — all accompanied by cool effects, splashes of blood, and stunning animations. Enemies react properly to hits, get knocked back by strong blows, and this creates an amazing sense of dynamic action.

However, as we progressed through the story, more and more systems were layered onto the basic combat mechanics: eventually, the game turned into a true slasher with abilities and combos. Just like with the open world, the combat system becomes more complex and overloaded with each passing hour. At the same time, you can’t ignore all the knowledge you’ve accumulated, because the battles themselves become a real challenge.

The number of enemies in fights becomes overwhelming, and Clive is not some ultra-tough knight who can withstand tons of damage. You’ll have to think tactically, combine and upgrade abilities to survive the toughest situations. The local bosses pose an even greater threat, and there are plenty of them. The developers clearly tried to make them unique, so every encounter is a real challenge. These battles were obviously inspired by Elden Ring and Dragon’s Dogma 2.

Fighting in Crimson Desert, despite the uneven difficulty curve, is both fun and painful. On the one hand, the game delights with the variety of its combat system and the huge room for experimentation. At a certain point, you’ll be able to control secondary characters from Clive’s squad and try to defeat bosses using new fighting styles. On the other hand, the game again suffers from some questionable design choices. The camera during battles behaves terribly. No matter how you set it up, it will always find an angle where you can only see the enemy dealing damage. We constantly had to zoom the camera out as far as possible just to keep track of what was happening on screen.

Character responsiveness and navigation during large battles also add to the frustration. The protagonist constantly turns the wrong way, rolls toward the enemy, and does everything except what you want him to do. You’ll need to spend a lot of time and nerves getting used to the character’s and camera’s quirks before you can really enjoy the combat and stop dying from silly mistakes.

In the end, Crimson Desert left us with mixed feelings. On one hand, there’s a massive open world with hundreds of different interactions, activities, and opportunities for leisurely exploration. The combat system is excellent, with interesting enemies, satisfying hits, buckets of blood, and bosses so impressive in size they’ll surprise even Dragon’s Dogma 2 fans. Dragon flights, castle sieges, camp management, dungeon clearing, puzzle solving, parkour, various challenges — in short, it’s a real dream for gamers who want a single game to fulfill all their needs.

On the other hand, there’s clumsy game design that doesn’t let you fully enjoy everything the developers have accomplished. The game is overloaded with mechanics and doesn’t care about helping the player consolidate new skills. The tricky controls, awkward camera, uneven combat difficulty, and slow pace might scare off casual players. It really is an MMO without the social interaction, where gameplay feels like playing a piano, and your personal time is the price you pay for content and entertainment.

We absolutely love Red Dead Redemption 2, The Legend of Zelda, and The Witcher 3, so we were willing to overlook all the obvious flaws of Crimson Desert. This game is a true adventure, giving you complete freedom of action and letting you decide how to play and what to do. It’s simply fascinating to explore and discover, and that’s its main strength. The industry is overflowing with open-world games, but most of them are just empty backdrops offering nothing but emptiness. In contrast, every location in Crimson Desert is a big sandbox filled with scattered toys, where everyone can find something fun to do.

Crimson Desert is an incredibly beautiful game from an art direction standpoint. Every location, city, biome, and even fortress is crafted down to the smallest detail. You can enter many buildings and appreciate their interiors. Forests, fields, deserts, and mountains—every part of the map is handmade with attention to detail. When visiting new locations, our first instinct was just to wander around and take everything in. The painstaking work and meticulous detailing are obvious at a glance.

The studio’s in-house engine offers good lighting and shading systems. However, with ray tracing turned off, all this beauty fades away, and a problem common to Unreal Engine 5 projects appears. The thing is, dynamic lighting is enabled by default in Crimson Desert, and without ray tracing, the game literally falls apart into pixels. We played on maximum graphics settings with DLSS turned off, and at night we saw how fire, rain, and other effects noticeably suffered. Indoors, the same issue occurred. Light literally emanated from the protagonist, and the shadows broke apart as if you were watching a 320p video.

Without DLSS, the game looks harsh, and we couldn’t find a software anti-aliasing option in the vast array of settings. With upscaling enabled, the game looks better, but NPC faces at a distance turn into mush, and their armor looks like a mess from the earliest neural networks. We tried different settings, and only DLSS 4.0 set to “Quality” gave a satisfactory result. Yes, the developers warned us in advance that the pre-release build of the game doesn’t work well with all driver versions (and promised to fix everything by release), but it feels like the problem runs deeper than that.

Overall, the game is beautiful, detailed, and rich, although the rendering is quite messy, and we can confidently say that Crimson Desert will look blurry on base console versions. We also want to highlight the incredible animation work. CD is one of the few games where every action is perfectly animated. The character properly opens chests, picks up items, and interacts with the environment. Moreover, the animations of NPCs, animals, and enemies are done at an astonishing level. The open world truly feels alive and real.

There’s also an excellent soundtrack here, which kicks in during story moments and when interacting with characters. Of course, it’s not on the level of The Witcher 3 or Skyrim, and it lacks the ambient background music found in Red Dead Redemption 2, but during battles, in taverns, and at epic moments, the soundtrack does a great job at setting the atmosphere.

In terms of performance and bugs, things are a bit complicated. We played on maximum settings but without ray tracing, and the game consistently held 60 frames per second. If there were any drops, they were barely noticeable. Overall, the game is well optimized despite the detailed environments. We didn’t encounter any major bugs. Occasionally, animations would play incorrectly, the protagonist could get stuck in the scenery, or menus would freeze, but these are minor issues that are forgivable for a project of this scale.

Crimson Desert is a mythical game that turned out to be real. Every feature promised by the developers is present in full. This is an incredibly vast and rich adventure with dozens of different mechanics, a living and beautiful open world, a decent (albeit somewhat stretched) story, interesting side quests, and tons of content that could take hundreds of hours to explore. The combat system is excellent, the bosses are fantastic, and the battles are memorable — the game constantly throws new challenges at you and never lets you get bored. Despite some rough edges in game design and overloaded controls, this is one of the best open-world games; a project where everyone can find something to do.

This is a concentrate of ideas from the best open-world games, where every mechanic and ability is organically woven into the overall gameplay. If you have a spare hundred hours, are ready to put up with inconvenient controls, and don’t mind fighting with the camera, this game deserves a place in your collection. And we’re waiting for patches!