After years of unimaginable hype (and a week or two of last-minute skepticism), the reviews for Crimson Desert are finally in. According to the critics, Pearl Abyss’ ambitious open-world game is neither a generational masterpiece or an over-hyped flop. It’s simply a solid open-world game where your enjoyment will depend on how much patience you have for its frustrating quirks.
As of this writing, Crimson Desert currently has an aggregate score of 78 pulled from 91 reviews. All of those reviews come from players on Windows PC, as there are currently no reviews logged for PS5 or Xbox Series X. (Critics were only provided with the PC version of the game ahead of release.) While there’s a bit of high praise and sharp criticism on both ends, reviewers ended up finding consensus somewhere around “good.”
On the positive side, critics are impressed by the game’s enormous sense of scale and density of activity. For MMORPG, Joseph Bradford called it “the most ambitious open world I’ve ever experienced” and plenty of write-ups echo a similar thought on a pure world design level. Even some of the more negative reviews praise Pearl Abyss for the ambition here. The most glowing reviews focus in on that point, like Forbes’ Paul Tassi.
“A hundred hours into this game, I have never been bored,” Tassi wrote in his review. “There are so many things to do, so many avenues of progression and questing and crafting and puzzles and boss hunting and territory takeovers and—the list just does not end.”
The bulk of the reviews are a bit more conservative. In a four-star review, GamesRadar+ writer Joel Franey praised the game’s pure spectacle, but noted that the game lacks a lot of refinements that keeps it from rising to the bar set by games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Still, Franey came out positive on it on the whole after getting comfortable with its bottomless well of systems.
