Crimson Desert Reviews
Crimson Desert is a massive and ambitious project defined by its extremes: it presents itself as a vast open-world game that incorporates the greatest modern gaming achievements, yet it suffers from a fragmented identity, shoddy storytelling, and an overwhelming abundance of content that stifles its original spirit. Nevertheless, it’s an adventure that’s well worth your attention, poised to improve steadily through dedicated post-launch support.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Crimson Desert is a massive game that pushes the boundaries of open world RPGs a little further, giving players a completely different level of freedom than competing titles. If you find yourself liking its unique style that won't suit everyone, its heavy focus on action and unrestricted adventuring will give you a great place to find hundreds of hours of entertainment.
Review in Unknown | Read full review
Crimson Desert lives up to its promise, delivering a rich open world with plenty of activities and fun combat. However, the title doesn't reach its peak because it lacks a particularly compelling protagonist and wastes the potential of other playable characters. Furthermore, the project still needs some polishing.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Crimson Desert is one of the most ambitious games in the genre in many years. Its open world is immense, but not empty, with the continent of Pywel rich in detail, inhabitants, secrets, and memorable landscapes. Exploring it is therefore a rewarding experience.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Although Crimson Desert falls short in terms of its story and narrative, its vast world, gameplay mechanics and brilliant execution have introduced the term ‘single-player MMORPG’ into our vocabulary, and we’re likely to be hearing it more often.
Review in Turkish | Read full review
Crimson Desert is a colossal, rough-edged, and at times chaotic game, yet one that is also incredibly captivating. Its controls demand patience, its narrative falls short of the potential of its world, and some of its design choices remain overly cumbersome. But it also boasts exceptional exploration, deep combat, an impressive array of mechanics, and a sense of adventure that few open-world games today can still convey with such power. Pearl Abyss has created a work that doesn’t aim for formal perfection, but for grandeur. And, despite stumbling several times along the way, it still manages to leave its mark. If you can get past the initial hurdle of the controls and accept a few inevitable rough edges, and overcome that ‘déjà vu’ feeling you’ll often experience when encountering a mechanic from that particular game, you’ll find yourself with a title capable of absorbing you for hundreds of hours, full of surprising moments and, above all, incredibly fun to play. It isn’t the most polished game in its category, but it is certainly one of the most vibrant, generous and ambitious of recent times.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Crimson Desert backseats the quality of its story and writing, yet it succeeds on its engaging exploration, outstanding technical prowess and an overabundance of content and activities.
Crimson Desert comes highly recommended because it’s a game that combines ambition, scale, and detail in an exceptional way. At first, it can be frustrating due to its dense systems, cryptic puzzles, and some questionable design choices, but when everything clicks, it offers a unique experience. It’s a game designed for those who enjoy in-depth exploration paired with a complex combat system, rewarding patience and curiosity.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Crimson Desert is a game of contradictions. It captivates and frustrates, offering a vast world that invites exploration even as its ideas feel held back. It’s “a giant playground,” yes, but one where every attraction seems restrained, never fully realized. Yet something keeps calling you back — above all, its world, “the beautiful frame of a painting,” urging you toward one more path, one more horizon. It has that peculiar charm of imperfect but sincere games: not entirely successful, yet strangely unforgettable. Crimson Desert doesn’t deliver on all its promises, but it leaves a mark. It could have been much more, yet it still manages to hold onto something — not everything, but enough to stay with you. In a landscape full of flawless but forgettable titles, that’s no small thing.
Review in Italian | Read full review
"Game of the Year" Crimson Desert offers an immersive and ambitious experience for open-world game enthusiasts, combining a complex combat system, free exploration, and interconnected life systems that provide depth and interactivity. Realistic graphics and advanced lighting enhance immersion, while the technical performance is relatively stable. However, the game requires patience and investment to grasp its complexity and overcome its technical and design challenges, making it an excellent experience for dedicated gamers but potentially overwhelming for beginners.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
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Review in Dutch | Read full review
Pearl Abyss's long-awaited RPG, Crimson Desert, had sort of a rough landing but eventually delivers one of the most absorbing open worlds in recent memory.
Crimson Desert is a gorgeous audiovisual experience with obtuse mechanics, poor mission design, and a nonexistent story. It plays like an MMO trapped in the frame of a single-player adventure game with too many cooks in the kitchen.
I think of Crimson Desert as an unrefined-but-still-promising The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild successor, but with a lot more Rockstar-design-level shenanigans in play. You have to give Pearl Abyss huge credit for somewhat succeeding in that action-adventure role-playing game design front, as well as listening to the community while implementing important changes for its long-term health. Crimson Desert's going places, but for now it's in quite a half-baked-but-still-entertaining state.
Crimson Desert is best for explorers, screenshot hunters, and system tinkerers who can live with rough edges. If you crave a tight story and carefully tuned combat, you will bounce off its excesses.
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.
Crimson Desert represents an impressive milestone in the open-world genre, offering a virtually endless array of things to explore, activities to undertake and enemies to face. However, it is not a perfect game: there are moments when the clarity of the mechanics and the user-friendly nature of a title of this scale seem to disappear. Many games promise too much and then disappoint. Crimson Desert is not one of them.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Crimson Desert is a visual titan that borders on Platonic perfection on its surface, but stumbles over its coarse substance and a soulless narrative. With addictive combat and breathtaking photorealism, it invites us to get lost in Pywel despite its clear technical rough edges and the weight of overwhelming hype—accepting that the purest beauty can also be imperfect.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Crimson Desert is a messy, ambitious RPG that constantly battles against itself. It’s frustrating and uneven, but its sheer scale and ideas make it hard to walk away from. A bold and often brilliant experience, this is the kind of game that sticks with you long after you’ve put it down.