GordonJAGReview Crimson Desert Review

Oh man, I wanted Crimson Desert to be good. I wanted it to be good so bad. It had things in it that looked so cool leading up to launch. A tight combat system with interesting and varied moves, multiple characters with different styles of play and their own unique stories, an open world with cool ways to explore it, and tiny little secrets packed away behind every corner. It felt like it was really grasping at something great and special, but it just fumbled it. They really managed to snag defeat from the jaws of victory with this one. And it started so nicely, which makes it even more annoying. You begin the game as Kliff, your generic warrior-leader type of the Greymanes faction. Right away, the Greymanes are attacked, with most slaughtered and the rest dispersed. Kliff is killed, brought to a tutorial area by floating geometry, and brought back to life. Bam, an easy core story to start the game. Your friends were killed or scattered everywhere, so there’s a narrative reason to rebuild the Greymanes and get revenge, and that also serves as a core gameplay motivator as well. But the wheels really fall off this thing so fast. You’re immediately thrown into a fairly generic fantasy town, which isn’t uncommon for games like Crimson Desert, but it’s how the game handles everything that makes this feel like a mess. In the town, you start getting introduced to individual factions and their quests, which also isn’t uncommon in these kinds of games, but CD has some kind of fetish for them. Oh no, you can’t have just a few major political factions as the world’s big players. Every tiny, insignificant faction and family has its own section in your menu, has its own NPCs, has its own tiny stories, and has its own quests. This sets a really bad start for how messy and undisciplined the story and worldbuilding are. Yes, a medieval fantasy world would probably have a quintillion different small allegiances and families, but that doesn’t make it enjoyable to navigate here. Side quests basically come down to small, petty nonsense, and aren’t interesting enough to make up for the fact that they don’t tie into the overarching story in any meaningful way. As someone who tries to engage with as much side content as possible when playing a game, there’s just too much bloat and fat around the side content in this game for it to be so boring and bland. That’s not even taking into consideration the side quests like bounties and just handing food over to random citizens, which were copied and pasted dozens of times throughout each region without ever being exciting. Even if they did all tie into the main story, the main story isn’t anything interesting either. Right after the game establishes its solid core motivation, the critical path soon devolves into its own separate mess of poorly written characters, allegiances, and bloated nonsense. I’m willing to concede that sometimes the critical path will get pushed to the side for a bit so you can indulge in other things, but this is too much. The main story is just poorly paced, barely connected filler, which is insane given that it's the main story. Not even recent Assassin’s Creed games have been this bad with setting up their main narratives, and those guys have been fumbling it for years now. It doesn’t get any better when your other playable characters—Damiane and Oongka—join the party. Damiane just kind of shows up to join you because of bad things going down in her homeland, and while Oongka at least has some plot relevance, you don’t get him until it’s way too late in the game. Their joining order almost feels backward, since Damiane just doesn’t have much going on except things getting messed up in her homeland, but her issues never feel important enough in the moment to justify her being in your party. It genuinely feels like they added Damiane more because they wanted a pretty girl as a playable character than someone with actual plot relevance. The worst part of having 3 playable characters is how the leveling is handled. You enhance skills using Abyss Artifacts, which you can get by defeating enemies as a sort of experience system, or you find them throughout the world through various means. This system is inherently fine on paper, but the game isn't played on paper. Each character has a large skill tree, and outside of core color nodes that affect things like health and stamina, no upgrades are shared. If you spent a lot of time putting Abyss Artifacts into Damiane (because she’s easily the most fun to play), you’re out of luck when you want to play as Oongka. You can reset your entire skill tree for a character, but have fun doing that each time you need to swap stuff around between characters. It’s such an unintuitive, grindy mess that it feels more like it belongs in their MMO, Black Desert than their single-player game. The core combat is definitely the best part of the game. Each character has multiple different combos and flashy attacks they can use, and those are genuinely fun to play around with. The bosses you go up against are mostly cool and exciting, with solid designs and attacks, and there’s always a Breath of the Wild-esque silly trick you can pull out against a boss. For as many awful design choices CD has, it does a great job nailing a solid combat system that lets you slaughter mooks en masse while saving beefier challenges for its special enemies. If the game had less fat surrounding the combat, the whole experience would have been so much better. It might have even been good enough to make up for the bad story and characters, but alas, we have what we have. While the combat is mostly enjoyable throughout, it isn't strong enough to carry a game of this size all the way through, and more wheels fall off this thing when it comes to the exploration and puzzle gameplay sections. The world is beautiful and has plenty of interesting sights, but it’s just too large. CD is yet another open world game that is just too big for its own good. It’s even more frustrating because it’s clear a lot of the exploration and traversal mechanics were inspired by games like Breath of the Wild, and that game would have also benefited from making its world about 25% smaller. CD just didn’t learn from the past mistakes made by already superior games in the genre, and instead steered into them, making itself worse than it really had to be. The puzzles themselves are their own issue. They’re not interesting, and none of them made me feel clever for solving them. With how a lot of them require Kliff to do things like climb on certain spots and use attacks, they were also needlessly clunky, and that wasn’t helped by things like Kliff having to slowly rotate statues he stabbed with his sword. It’s all just so unnecessarily padded out in a game that’s already too padded out for its own good. Most of the time, the rewards weren’t even good enough to justify how annoying the puzzles were to do. You would usually just get an Abyss Artifact, and with how many of those you need, a single one as a reward just isn’t cutting it. If you’re a player who genuinely cannot get enough of doing the same task over and over and over and over again, then you’ll probably get your money’s worth from just the sheer amount of gameplay that technically exists in Crimson Desert. But if you’re someone who wants a game that’s more disciplined and makes better use of its mechanics with less repetition and tedium, or characters and a story that don’t suck, I would look elsewhere. Despite everything Crimson Desert could proudly put down on a features list, it’s spread too thin to make the most out of any of them, and it proves again that the mythical Everything Game just isn’t here yet.