PC REVIEW | Crimson Desert

What can only be described as a love letter to recent Zelda games and almost every FROMSOFTWARE game, Crimson Desert is finally here, and after what has felt like a lifetime, we finally get to see behind the curtain on what Pearl Abyss has been working on. Prior to its launch, Crimson Desert was dragged over the coals for its lack of footage, a strict embargo close to release, and the footage we did get seemed poorly optimised. Anyone who has been around on the internet for the last couple of years will undoubtedly know that it usually spells trouble, and a small minority of people tried to destroy it before fans even got it into their hands.

It is important to know that Crimson Desert is a huge game, and with that comes a certain of level harsh cuts that needed to be made just to get it running in a stable way. What I can say is that during my time reviewing Crimson Desert, Pearl Abyss has pushed out update after update, and things are slowly getting better. Scale is something to keep in mind when reading this review, because there is a lot to talk about. There is a lot of good, and equally a lot of bad. I expect this to change as the year progresses, especially since there are some things I consider major failings.

Things I liked!

• The Graphics | Graphically, Crimson Desert is a beautiful looking game. It takes some tweaking even on powerful PCs, but the end result is largely an impressive looking game that rivals many AAA studios with extremely high budgets. I will explain in more detail below about the lighting specifically as it does have issues, but these are largely made worse by its night scenes only. During the day, Crimson Desert is an immaculate game to walk around in.
  
  Heavy foliage, dense cities and towns, small villages, with caves almost everywhere to explore. Everything feels alive to a degree I rarely see in open world games. Foliage in particular looks amazing, even on testing some of the lower settings. Water physics and quality look incredible, and even react accurately when wading through it or swimming. The real detail, however, is in the models. Characters look fantastic, and so do buildings. Architectural designs have clearly been referenced lots when making them, even the interiors.

• Music & Sound | Crimson Desert has a fantastic soundtrack. It is weird to say, but for such a huge game, the loading screen has probably my favourite music to listen to. It’s atmospheric, it’s orchestral, and delivers a very soothing, yet powerful score that is voiced by hymn singers. Crimson Desert at its core is a deeply rooted religious game with many churches, temples and places of worship to be found. As such, a lot of ethereal sounding music is present throughout the game. Combat sounds and boss fight music are grittier, with a healthy dose of heavy drums and trumpets. Sound effects are fantastic with sword clashes, parries, and gunshots feeling punchy, and realistic. Spells, incantations, cooking, all sound great, too, especially with the many dishes you can cook.
  
  
• Combat | The combat is what makes Crimson Desert so appealing to play. It is a gritty, dirty, and methodical affair that will even have veteran soulslike players pulling their hair out. General enemies aren’t too much trouble, but they can be vast in numbers, and suddenly the confidence you had a few seconds ago dispatching a small handful, will induce stress and fear.
  
  Crimson Desert has some rather large areas that need liberating from time to time, and one of the earliest examples of this is in the form of the quarry at Hernand. While I was trying to stick to the main quest line, for the sake of this review, I did end up doing a fair few side quests to see what some of the optional content is like, and Hernand quarry was a very extreme example about what I mentioned above. Hernand quarry is home to just over one thousand troops. Yes, read that last part again. One thousand. You are expected to take them all out as part of one of the faction missions. This did take quite some time, but since I had already made the commitment to making Hernand my home at the time, I wanted to make sure I did all that I could.
  
  This example became quite a frequent occurrence throughout the main campaign, too. Some of the later missions will see you storming castles to take back territory from the Black Bears, and laying waste to hordes of enemies is part of that. You have the usual parry system found in most soulslike games that stagger enemies when you time it right, allowing you to deliver a flurry of blows using your sword, or even your secondary larger weapon, such as a spear or greatsword. It’s a satisfying feeling when landing these parries as most enemies in Crimson Desert have a very wide set of moves that they can draw from, which makes learning their patterns a challenge at first.
  
  
• Skills & Upgrades | There are a hefty amount of upgrades to unlock for Kliff, Oongka, and Damiane. Each character has three main skills to focus on. Health, Stamina, and Spirit. Health, as you may have guessed, levels up your health and how much damage you can take before dying, stamina is how far you can run, fly, and fight for before needing a breather, and spirit is for conducting the abilities you unlock, such as focus, spirit palm, natures force, and so on.
  
  Once these are depleted, you can eat certain items through cooking, or found in the world to restore these values. Resting also allows these to be restored, too. You can also unlock new attacks as well such as charged bow shots, heavier swings of your sword, grappling enemies, throwing enemies, melee combat moves like wrestling takedowns, and even evasive moves too. It all depends on what your style of play is. Stealth is doable in Crimson Desert, but it feels more of an afterthought than an option. It’s more of a “range type or a close and personal type” of deal which abilities are linked to.
  
  
• Multiple Characters | To my surprise, Crimson Desert allows you to play as other characters throughout the story. They aren’t present until much later in the game, and these instances are forced on you, but they break up the rather “stiff Kliff” syndrome you get by the time it happens. Each of the characters has their own special abilities as well, and once you are back as Kliff, you can summon them to your side to help you fight in battle.
  
  Oongka, a half goblin, half troll partner, has a gigantic axe which has a double jump ability. He has regenerative health and deals massive damage. Sadly, his specific section is very short-lived, but it was fun playing as him. Damiane was by far my favourite to play as. She is quick on her feet, can summon lightning as a spell, and delivers quickly lightning fast attacks with her rapier. Damiane doesn’t deal as much damage, but she makes up for it in speed. Each of the characters has their own sub story as well, which was nice to explore for the short time I got to experience them. It makes the character development feel much more grounded, and given Damiane’s story specifically, I cared a lot more for her than the others.
  
  
• Tons of things to see and do | You will have to forgive me for not going into too much depth here, but the sheer amount of things to see and do will have you reading all day. As with many open-world games, there is always something extra to do, however, Crimson Desert takes this to the next level. Cooking, crafting, shopping, exploring secret areas, upgrading weapons, stealing, completing bounties, rescuing people, spying, reading, base building, picking flowers, catching bugs, arm wrestling, playing rock, paper, scissors, and fishing, but to name just a few.
  
  My go-to favourite thing to do in Crimson Desert while making my way through the story was cooking, and creating buffs from the cauldrons found in towns. Early on, I found the recipe for revival boluses, and these proved to be a huge game changer. Cooking provided me with the food I needed to heal during battle if I was ever low on health, and this specifically saved me from death on multiple occasions. There are many recipes to find throughout Crimson Desert, and these are marked conveniently on your mini map when you are within range. Picking them up allows you to read them, store that knowledge, and then next time you go to cook, make the dish, providing you have enough ingredients.
  
  
• Boss Fights | Crimson Desert’s standout moments lie within its boss fights. Each of these serve as chapter ends, or bridges the gap between mid-chapter cliff-hangers that surprise you when they do arrive. Crimson Desert never feels like it builds up to a big fight, and some of the usual enemies end up transitioning right in front of you to these big behemoth-type bosses that throw you around like a doll. All in all, Crimson Desert has seventy-six bosses to fight, with twenty-six of those being main story bosses. The remaining fifty of those are all spread out to either find on your own, or are part of the hundreds of side quests found throughout the regions.
  
  A special shout out goes to the giant monkey troll, who made me step away for an hour before reattempting. What an immense fight in such a small space. Most of the bosses will have multiple phases as well, with the final boss having four phases. He is insanely difficult, probably one of the hardest bosses I have ever fought in a soulslike game. After many attempts, I resorted to crafting over fifty revive boluses just to get me back on my feet once I had met death. Rinse and repeating this tactic eventually saw me beat him, and draw a line in the sand. A hell of a fight, but one I am not ready to experience again any time soon.

Mixed & disliked!

• The Story | Crimson Desert’s story is a mixed bag. It doesn’t feel grand compared to the rest of the world. The core premise and the narrative itself can feel loose and overshadowed by the game’s open-world activities and side content. You play as Kliff, a mercenary leader in the war-torn land of Pywel, whose group (the Greymanes) is nearly wiped out after an attack by a rival faction. He survives and sets out across the continent to reunite his scattered comrades and rebuild the group. Along the way, he becomes entangled in wider conflicts involving rival factions, political struggles, and mysterious supernatural forces shaping the world. The story mixes personal survival and loyalty with a larger quest to confront the enemy leader responsible for the Greymanes’ downfall.
  
  The whole scenario feels a little ripped from Game of Thrones, specifically around the battle for political power and the many different factions of people trying to claim it. Overall, it falls flat, and I never saw the purpose of Kliff getting mixed up in other people’s problems.

• The lighting | By far Crimson Desert’s biggest issue lies within its lighting technique. Emissive bounce lighting is the preferred method to light the many interior and exterior scenes in the game. What happens in this instance, is the game suffers incredibly from poor visual quality given how the final light gather quality makes it look like the lighting is flickering all over the place. Transitioning from light to dark areas causes intense light bleeding, and the BlackSpace Engine’s use of RTGI has a very aggressive radiance cache which can make lighting look very unnatural in some scenes, especially at night. Daytime scenes fare much better, however the TSR implementation leaves a terrible smeary look in fast-moving scenes that causes ghosting, which isn’t as noticeable at night. Two very different issues at two different times of day, cause a somewhat frustrating image quality no matter when you play.
  
  
• No Intel Arc support | I was quite disappointed to read that Pearl Abyss did not give support to PC players who choose to run Intel Arc GPUs. This is an issue because more and more gamers are choosing Intel for a multitude of reasons. XESS implementation is overtaking FSR, and even proves to be more stable in some cases, price is very reasonable, and the amount of VRAM you get for that price is insanely good. Nvidia still ships modern RTX cards with 8GBs of VRAM, and this is simply not enough in 2026. Intel gives a minimum of 12GBs and offers up to 24GBs on some cards. Even more disappointing was the response that Pearl Abyss gave when asked about future support. Telling people to get a refund when they should have been supported from the beginning is not a good business look.
  
  
• Quite a few bugs | With every large open-world game, we do tend to get more issues. Crimson Desert is not immune to this, either. There are some frustrating bugs that I would have liked to have seen get fixed as a priority, but a lot of the updates seem to be adding features rather than fixing existing ones. The worst offender so far is the “on-death” bug where the game doesn’t record the death state, and instead leaves you laying face down in the dirt while the enemies still attack your corpse. You still get full control of the menus and the camera, and can even heal, but your character won’t get up or take any damage. Instead, all you can do is restart from a previous checkpoint, or reload a different save. This was especially frustrating when fighting a boss and they are one hit away from being defeated, and the bug means you have to do the fight all over again.
  
  The biggest bug I encountered was shortly after playing as Damiane. Upon returning to play as Kliff, the game state hadn’t changed and thought I was still playing as her. I would be greeted with the message, “This is Kliff’s story”, followed by being forced to abandon what I was doing, then a short loading screen to an area elsewhere on the map. This was a pain because you are forced at certain sections of the game to play as other characters. I had to fix this by re-loading an earlier save, which kicked me back about two hours of progress, and pray that it didn’t happen again. Thankfully it didn’t and I was able to continue, but had I not been running multiple saves, this could have been a nightmare.
  
  Achievement bugs are also present, with end game, mid-game, and others not popping either.
  
  
• Voice acting | Voice acting is serviceable, but it is only the main characters and some supporting characters that do a decent job. A lot of the background characters and even some supporting characters do a rather poor job in selling the urgency of the story, or what the moment calls for. For example, Yann he’s always swearing, never understanding the moment, and the voice acting seems to go overboard for what is needed in that moment in time. The energy in the voice lines is all over the place, and out of all of the Greymanes, Yann was one of the only ones I never connected with.
  
  
• No difficulty options | Crimson Desert does not have a difficulty option to choose from, nor does it scale as you play. I always find that fewer options available to tweak the gameplay experience is a bad choice. Given how Crimson Desert is a much more difficult game than most soulslikes, I would have appreciated an option to scale based on my gameplay.
  
  
• Clunky controls | Crimson Desert uses an animation priority system, meaning the game can feel heavy when trying to swap from running to jumping, or swinging your sword to parrying. In a nutshell, the game will need to almost finish what you started previously before carrying out the next action. A good example to compare it to would be games from Rockstar like GTA and Red Dead Redemption. For example, tapping the bottom face button on your controller will start a light jog, and tapping it faster will cause your character to sprint and then cause your stamina to drain. Jumping from this state won’t be instant, and people who have played the examples above will know what I mean.
  
  Planning your next move when fighting is imperative when trying to stay alive and dispatch enemies. This is not a hack and slash game, and treating it as such will see you die a lot. Crimson Desert does suggest you play with a controller, even on PC. I feel like this is mainly due to the amount of button combinations that exist for the myriad of different things you can do in this game. Whether it is combat moves with its complex move list, or how it requires you to lock on to the thousands of objects that you can interact with in the world. It is simply not enough to walk up to a person and talk, because there are usually dense crowds, and items littered throughout the world that it means careful precision is needed when carrying out normal everyday tasks.
  
  The final point on controls and something that surprised me greatly, was that if you use a wireless or Bluetooth-enabled controller like the PS5 controller, Steam will tell you that this game should be played with a wired connection, otherwise it will default to the Xbox controller layout, thus causing confusion when playing.
  
  
• Generative AI use | As of the time of writing, it was clear that Crimson Desert uses generative AI in part of its game creation technique and sadly those assets were still left inside the final game. While it may not be a detriment to the game itself, it does have to be addressed around the ethical side. Generative AI is usually trained on artwork from other artists. These are uncredited, it takes away from creatives in the industry, and also has an impact on the world too. Water prices will likely rise, since it puts immense pressure on the need for water which is used to cool data centres around the world. AI companies use approximately 6.6 billion cubic meters alone, and we all saw the effects of what this did to PC components late last year with crazy pricing. The same will happen with water.
  
  As a collective, we should embrace manual skilled artists, and not rely on machines to take that away from us. Pearl Abyss has issued a public apology about it, and have promised to remove all AI art references from the game via a patch.
  

CONCLUSION

Score: 65/100

A gorgeous, punishing adventure weighed down by bugs, lighting woes, and a story that never quite keeps up.

Crimson Desert, despite its issues, proves to be a very capable RPG/soulslike game that offers a ton of interactivity in what appears to be a compelling, living and breathing world. Those who are veterans of the souls-like genre will likely feel overwhelmed here with its staggering 168 missions just inside the main story alone. It may feel like a copy-paste of Game of Thrones at times, but for the most part, its diverse portfolio of characters delivers a somewhat fun and engaging gameplay experience, enriched by its epic boss fights and jaw-dropping daylight scenery. Crimson Desert offers a lot of content that will keep you busy for weeks long after the main story has drawn to a close.