If you’ve ever been floored by a game’s combat so striking you cheer at your screen, only to immediately groan at its over-engineered inputs, you’ve got my Summer Game Fest experience with Crimson Desert in a nutshell. Pearl Abyss’s ambitious medieval RPG fuses knuckle-busting fighting game flair with open-world epicness—and that duality is both its greatest strength and its most glaring stumbling block.
For the uninitiated: I cut my teeth on Shenmue’s deliberate street brawls and memorized arcade-stick combos for hours on end. Action games with impactful hits and satisfying animations are my jam—but I also have zero patience for “hold L2, tap X, circle, square, triangle, then hold R3” just to open a door. That background makes me both predisposed to love Crimson Desert’s bone-crunching spectacle and skeptical of any design that overcomplicates the basics.
From the moment I took control of Kliff Macduff—yes, that’s the character’s name, and it’s freakin’ glorious—I was struck by how grounded everything felt. Armor clinks, swords scrape leather, and wind tousles banners as you ride into frigid mountain passes and mossy forest glades. Yet the instant you leap off your warhorse to face half a dozen bandits, the game unleashes its hidden fighting game pedigree: shield bashes that chain into super jumps, grappling-hook escapes, and full-screen shockwaves that send foes cartwheeling. I pulled off an RKO-style aerial smash so satisfying I nearly turned cartwheels myself.
The combat system is undoubtedly the highlight. Controllers buzz with haptic feedback as you parry, shatter shields, and unleash devastating finishers. An enemy lunges for a heavy strike? Nail the parry, then flow into a four-hit combo that ends with a ground-pounding shockwave. Bring out your bow, fire explosive incendiary arrows to ignite oil slicks, then switch to a warhammer for a bone-splintering follow-up.
But here’s the catch: many special moves require simultaneous thumbstick presses plus two face buttons, or a quick “circle-square-triangle” input sequence. On a controller, that took me roughly 15 minutes to master—but for less seasoned players, or anyone trying keyboard/mouse, it could feel like slicing through Jell-O. I mapped combos to keys like Q+E+F, but even then I fumbled mid-boss fight. More on that in a bit.
Pearl Abyss clearly wanted every action to feel interactive, and while I respect that ambition, not every system needs an elaborate QTE. I spent about an hour poking at the crafting, stealth, and exploration loops between skirmishes, and here’s where things get interesting.
The world offers abundant gathering nodes—ore veins jut out of rock faces, herb clusters hide behind bushes, and fallen siege weapons yield parts. You can craft everything from upgraded boots to alchemical grenades. The blacksmith menu is slick, showing real-time previews of your gear, but selecting materials requires dragging and dropping rather than a one-button “craft all.” It’s neat if you’re obsessive about optimization, but a “craft max” shortcut would save dozens of clicks over a long session.
One side quest had me sneaking into a bandit camp to recover a stolen heirloom. Climbing walls with my grappling hook felt fluid, and light-and-shadow mechanics meant I could crouch behind barrels or lure guards with thrown stones. Stealth kills trigger a brief animation—again, with a tiny prompt sequence: hold Shift, then tap F. It’s more immersive than a simple “press E,” but occasionally I wasted precious seconds fumbling the order, and got spotted more than once.
The demo map spanned ancient ruins, frozen cliffs, and a ruined manor with hidden chambers. A few areas used environmental puzzles—rotating bridges, lever-powered gates, and light-reflection crystals—to unlock secret rooms. Those felt genuinely rewarding, but after two puzzles I yearned for a quick “fully explore area” button instead of multiple lever-tweaking sequences. When exploration is this beautiful, limiting friction is key.
I tested a custom keyboard/mouse build after the controller demo. Default binding placed movement on WASD, camera on the mouse, light/heavy attacks on left/right click, dodge on Space, block on Ctrl, and special combos on number keys. It works, but shifting your hands between WASD and number row for a combo mid-battle felt like orchestrating a mini ballet. Mouse wheel scrolling to cycle abilities was intuitive, though, and target locking with Tab stayed rock-steady even when dozens of NPCs flooded the frame.
Accessibility options were present but sparse: you can remap every single key, enable high-contrast UI, and tweak subtitle size. I didn’t see toggle-to-hold options for some of the longer QTE prompts or an “easy-mode” for non-combat interactions. Colorblind filters covered protanopia and deuteranopia, which is great for monitoring status effects on party members, but the core friction of multi-step prompts remains an obstacle to players with motor impairments.
Boss 1: Cassius Morten, the Iron Warden—set atop a crumbling keep, this hulking knight wields a flail and a shield that emits shockwaves. The fight staged me against swinging pendulums, arrow volleys from parapets, and a timed sequence to dismantle siege towers. I executed a perfect parry and counter-combo, but when it came time to break his guard and perform the finishing grapple, I had to quickly chain “stick-down + X, circle + triangle, then R2.” I slipped up, got staggered, and ate 40% of my health. Fun? Yes. Frustrating? Also yes.
Boss 2: The Frost Drake of Shivering Pass—this optional dragon encounter dropped me on a snow-caked plateau where ice pillars popped up randomly. The key was to shatter those pillars, expose the boss’s belly, then climb onto its side. The physics-driven animation when you smash through ice was gorgeous. But the subsequent prompt—hold Shift+E to mantled, then press Space+F to drive your sword in—felt like two QTEs in rapid succession, and any slip meant free tail whips. A simpler climb and plunge mechanic would have kept me in the action longer.
I played on a high-end rig with an NVIDIA RTX 4070, 32GB RAM, and a 4K monitor. Frame rates hovered around 60–70fps in action sequences, dipping to mid-50s when particle effects and dozens of foes filled the screen. Load times between zones were under 10 seconds. I encountered one UI tooltip overlap in the skill tree and a stray enemy model that sank through the ground, but no crashes or progress-blocking bugs. Camera lock-on jittered slightly during fast enemy spawns, but overall the demo felt solid for a vertical slice.
If you thrive on spectacle—crowd-clearing combos, ragdoll physics, siege-scale battles—and love mastering layered inputs, you’ll be grinning ear-to-ear. But if your ideal RPG is one-button interactions, minimal QTEs, or you simply want a smooth “press to loot” experience, prepare for input fatigue. Players who adored methodical pacing in Kingdom Come: Deliverance or the simplicity of open-world RPGs may find the fiddly prompts more headache than heroics.
In short, Crimson Desert is the most exhilarating hybrid of fighting-game intensity and open-world RPG scale I’ve experienced at SGF. Streamline the button-gobbledygook, deepen the non-combat loops, and broaden accessibility options—and you may have a genre landmark on your hands. As it stands, I’m torn between awe and annoyance—and eagerly awaiting a chance to see how Pearl Abyss refines this wild ride before launch.
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