One of the first things that struck me when playing Crimson Desert is just how complicated the control scheme can get. There’s button combos and sequences that feel more like what you’d expect of a fighting game than of an action RPG, and the four boss battles we tried demonstrated such a variety of individual game mechanics beyond the typical fare. Heck, there’s some Spider-Man style web-swinging thrown in for one of them!
But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Crimson Desert is an interesting game project in its own right. Originally thought of as a prequel to Pearl Abyss’ MMO Black Desert Online, it’s morphed into something else, a single player action adventure game with that oh so familiar “if you can see it, you can go there” sensibility to the huge world that they’ve constructed.
It does, however, feel rather generic in a number of ways. The continent of Pywel is beset by war between two factions, the warmongering Black Bears and the peace-seeking Greymanes. Naturally you’re aligned with the latter faction, playing as their leader, Kliff, whose most immediately distinctive characteristic is having some blue stripes down one side of his face.
The other quite striking characteristic from playing the game’s opening battle sequence should be how full of holes he is, after being resoundingly beaten and stabbed by the Black Bears leader Myudrin. It’s alright, though. He gets better again, and we jumped ahead to sample those four main boss battles.
The Staglord is certainly the most conventional, a big, powerful warlord who leaps and charges to close the gap to you before dishing out hefty sword attacks that will send you flying if they land. It’s a fight where I came out ahead despite feeling that I was constantly losing – and truth be told, I did have to rely on the healthy stocks of restorative Veal Burgers that Pearl Abyss had pre-filled Kilff’s pockets with.
Even here, the complexity of the game’s combat controls was clear to see. There’s naturally light and heavy attacks, parrying and countering, and you need to be aware of your snail-like stamina meter on screen, but anything beyond the basics needs button combos. Pairs of face buttons pressed together pull of things like a sweeping reverse slash, trigger a flurry attack to deal a rapid sequence of blows, and more.
I needed to rely on more of these extended techniques for the other boss battles. Fighting Hexe Marie, a witch who can turn into a murder of crows and summon pot-headed automatons to swarm you, brought plenty of other challenges, and opportunities to master some other techniques. The key to defeating her was really about bringing explosive arrows to the party, helping to blast her minions into chunks of crockery.
What I didn’t quite get a hang of, through the barrage of inputs and combos I needed to learn, was force shoving Kliff up into the air, triggering his Pecision Focus slow-mo ability, and then unleashing a rapid flurry of arrows all together. It looks great in the gameplay tutorials I saw, but I didn’t really manage to pull it off myself.
Not even at the second attempt, when facing the Reed Devil, a very fast and very elusive masked enemy that you fight in the middle of a field of wheat. Once again, I was getting slapped around by a boss, though this time, his weakness was on clear display with a series of protective totems to try and take out.
I quite enjoyed that, where the Staglord came to a timely demise, Hexe-Marie and Reed Devil leant into the kind of comic book defeats that let them slink away to fight another day. There’s some great action in the mini cutscenes that mark the switch between health bars for each boss, the compliments the over-the-top combat abilities nicely, not to mention the flashy particle effects that compliment so many attacks. It’s like you’re fighting with a Catherine Wheel in hand instead of a large sword, as a shower of sparks is unleashed around you.
By far the most interesting boss, albeit the one that we spent the least time with, was against Queen Stoneback Crab. This rock-covered hill of a creature brings in a touch of the Shadow of the Colossus, as you have to clamber up her back as she bucks and rears to try and fling you into the sky – which can easily lead to your death from falling, if you forget or don’t know the button to press to start gliding back down with the Crow’s Wing ability.
You’re searching for a handful of silvery patches to smash and then stab through to release a poisonous affectation that is altering her behaviour, and eventually give you the opening to Spider-Man grapple to her, swing yourself around and come smashing down on a pile of pots at the top of her shell.
We only had around an hour to make our way through these boss fights, and didn’t get to see the wider open world, but I’m already impressed by what I saw. There’s a great deal of variation between these four encounters, the combat mechanics have plenty of depths to master, the visuals look great, and that’s all before the promise of the huge open world outside of these moments. Sure, it’s a bit of a hodge podge of ideas, but if you embrace that, then Crimson Desert is absolutely one to keep an eye on as it heads to release later this year.
