Summary
After a year of anticipation, I finally got to playCrimson Desertat Gamescom. It wasn’t what I was expecting at all, and that’s no bad thing. From my previous glimpse at a behind-closed-doors demo session at last year’s event, I was hoping to get my hands on some of the open world exploration, questing, and life skills to get a better idea of exactly what sort of game Crimson Desert was. Instead, Gamescom’s demo was an extremely punishing, brutal boss rush. I knew that Crimson Desert was going to have a hefty and complex combat system—I’ve played enough Black Desert to know Pearl Abyss are masters of this craft—but this is something else entirely.
When I walked into the booth, the team immediately told me that the demo was difficult. Sure, I thought, it shouldn’t be too much to get my head around in an hour-long play session. It began with a short introductory video detailing some of the impressive combos you could pull off, but as I sat down and began looking at some of the controls underneath the screen, I knew things were about to get real. There was one combo that involved both triggers, both bumpers, and three different buttons, pressed and held in a specific order.
As expected, I died fighting against the multiple enemies that swarmed the battlefield during the tutorial section. The enemy AI was surprisingly advanced, with foes flanking, teaming up on you, backing off, dodging out of the way, rolling, and generally just beating the ever-living snot out of my character. My first death, I was just fittingly kicked off a cliff (the main character’s name is Kliff, which would have been funnier if I explained it first) and died in the river.
I managed to get past the tutorial as I got used to the slashing and parrying mechanics, as well as how to better time my dodges. Then it was straight into a boss battle against the Reed Devil. This is a fantastic fight to showcase some of the best parts of Crimson Desert—a seamless transition between cutscene and combat, the environment transforming as you fight (your sword slices through the reeds, leaving huge patches where you’ve danced with the Devil), and the complexity of its three-stage boss fights.
The combat was so punchy and volatile. Kliff has an amazing headlock slam RKO move, a time-bending slow motion mode with explosive arrows, and the ability to jump and kick the Reed Devil in the head. Once I started to get the hang of this, when I eventually started to understand the combos, it felt more Street Fighter than anything else. It’s timing, precision, and control, and if you can pull it off, it feels incredible. Way more involved than any Soulslike I’ve played, and even more immersive in its realistic, thudding combat than Dragon’s Dogma 2.
After defeating the Reed Devil, it was time for Staglord. Picture prime Jon Snow against Prime Robert Baratheon and you’ve got this boss fight. This guy hit me so hard he actually punched me out of the map, and the developer overlooking my battle actually laughed and said, “We haven’t seen that happen before. We’ll fix that.” I never managed to defeat the Staglord: he just hit so hard and fast so quickly that I couldn’t tie together enough dodges and blocks to get past him. And so concluded my hour of gametime. It flew by. I wanted to keep trying to master those combos, but that was all I got.
Some people have compared Crimson Desert to FromSoft’s efforts based on this demo, but I don’t think that’s the case here. There’s way more versatility in the combat mechanics, particularly the combos, and we’ve only had a small glimpse of a few bosses so far. Combine that with the open world—which we still don’t know that much about—plus the other crafting and upgrade systems, and Crimson Desert definitely looks like one of the most ambitious games I’ve seen for a long time. I am still cautious with my optimism, but I can’t wait to see more of what this game has to offer.
