What We Love About Crimson Desert

Crimson Desert is the first game that the entire VULKK team has thoroughly enjoyed. Never have we encountered or covered a game that everyone here has 100% loved playing.

Usually, not all of us play and cover the same game. We all have our unique and distinct genre or gameplay features preferences and expectations. We also have a rule: when you don’t enjoy a game, just don’t play it and don’t write guides for it.

We haven’t done a proper review for Crimson Desert, and while it does have its fair share of flaws, we want to celebrate a game that has every right to be regarded as highly as The Witcher 3, Skyrim, GTA, and Zelda, so we are only going to focus on the positives here.

In March 2026, before the game’s launch, I asked my team to share what excites them the most about Crimson Desert.

Now, let’s see how much of these expectations came true and what made each of us spend (so far) 300-500+ hours with Crimson Desert.

Why Ruby Loves Crimson Desert

The puzzles and exploration are what hooked me the most. There’s also some degree of build-making and min-maxing that was great to play around with. As you progress later in the game, the Camp is also a great way to automate many tasks that would otherwise be tedious.

Puzzle and Exploration

The amount of puzzles and exploration objectives is fantastic. As you progress, you gain more tools to help with both, and it can often lead to entirely forgetting about progressing the Main Story in favor of all the discoveries you come across.

I know I personally got side tracked every time the game sent me to the Abyss, knowing there were more puzzles after the one I arrived at originally.

These even end up going hand-in-hand, as doing many of the puzzles blind will send you to multiple different locations across different regions of Pywel. While many are very similar in nature, there’s enough variety to at least keep them interesting.

The best part of many of these puzzles, especially those located in the Abyss, is that they have multiple solutions but remain solvable regardless of what abilities you do and don’t have access to.

Build Craft

While it’s arguably simple, or at least simple compared to what you’d find in an MMO or ARPG, there are enough weapons and combinations of them that make for interesting builds. While the individual weapons themselves aren’t too different in terms of stats, which is a shame for some of the unique designs they created, each weapon type at least has enough variation in stats to offer some meaningful.

The real meat of putting together a build is in the Abyss Gears. These allow you to truly build around your weapon(s) of choice. So much so that it’s a bit of a bummer that a lot of the more unique Abyss Gears are either locked behind bosses or paying a high cost for them from Back Alley Vendors.

Throughout my time playing, I also made use of the Pre-order and Twitch Drop Gear, being marked as “Key Items” to be able to easily swap between different sets of Abyss Gear with minimal effort or taking up inventory space early on. Towards endgame, this shifted toward being a combat and gathering set, in case I passed by areas with valuable resources.

The Greymane Camp

The Greymane Camp has been a consistent way to collect ingredients for meals throughout the game. This even became more powerful with the addition of the Kuku Cooler, which allows you to access ingredients from anywhere. The only ingredients it doesn’t offer (and should) are Salt, Cooking Oil, and Water, which are staples of MANY late game meals accessible only through vendor runs (or wells for water)

Once you get deeper into the game, though, you can use it to quickly build up a stock of important crafting items, Ammo, and even more exclusive items like Abyss Gears that offer a significant jump in power.

What is available is also dictated by Research as well, which admittedly can be quite costly for the better unlocks. But the one-time costs are definitely outweighed by the benefits and really make the camp a thing that needs to be well-managed at all times.

Why Adrian Loves Crimson Desert

I was cautiously optimistic about the game and ended up pleasantly surprised by the unbelievable freedom we were given at any point of our progression. I adored interacting with animals and obtaining pets. The combat is simple, but very flexible and provokes your imagination.

Complete Freedom

The thing that made me love this game is the fact that I’m not forced to do anything. I could spent hours just wandering around just trying to find something fun or do the main quests without having to worry too much about sidequests or progress in other areas.

For example, I absolutely hate the process of upgrading the camp. It was tedious and having to spend more than a few minutes with Yann was worse than hearing the prisoners talk on their way to jail. I have neglected that aspect and it hasn’t impact my enjoyment by a bit.

Gathering resources to upgrade my gear isn’t my favorite thing either. So far, I have been able to defeat every enemy, including the final boss of the main quest, without refining my gear past level 6.

Sure, I might be making things harder for myself but I love that i am not required to have the absolute best gear in the game to beat the toughest enemies.

While I plan to complete every aspect of the game, it’s really nice that it’s me, the player, who decide what to do and when. Obviously, there are a few ocassions where the story requires you to do something, but it’s usually something simple and when it’s not, at least it involves a very fun battle.

Animals, pets, and mounts

I love all types of animals, so being able to see, pet and own some of them as mounts is one of my favorite aspects of the game. I have dozens of screenshots of Kliff holding wild animals because it looks funny and that’s a good way to add them to the journal without killing them.

One of the first things I did in Hernand was figure out how to get a dog as my companion. Since then, I have “adopted” a few more. Though I am still hoping that they add a Golden Retriever.

The moment update 1.04.00 dropped, I immediately went to earn 100 trust with as many birds as I could. Unfortunately, my 30 pet slots filled very quickly and they still haven’t added more. How do they expect us to collect all of them without enough spots?

Last but not least is the Legendary Mounts. The coolest animals in the game are some of these mounts. Some are locked behind long questlines while others are found in a specific spot. Royler is my favorite choice to cover medium distances while the Polar Bear is my option when I am going into battle.

Combat

The reason I enjoy the combat in Crimson Desert so much is that it can be as simple, complex or as silly as you want. You can create complex and flashy combos or simply spam two buttons in quick sucession and have the same success.

Sometimes I want my fights to be somewhat cinematic, while others I just want to tear through my enemies as quickly as possible so I can get to my destiny.

There’s also the fact that we have access to so many abilities that are useful against different types of enemies. For example, Blinding Flash or Axiom Force wouldn’t be my first choices in a fight, but they are life-saving skills when facing the Antumbra Order or the Crimson Nightmare respectively.

And let’s not forget about all the silly ways you can kill an enemy. One-shot a boss with a tree, using them as training dummies to show-off your wrestling moves or use the four elements to feel like the Avatar.

There’s always something new

Last but definitely not least is being able to always find something new. A piece of armor, enemy, easter egg, or a combination of Abyss Gears that are incredible when paired together. This is what continues to retain my interest in this game after 300 hours of playing.

If I get bored, I can try a new fighting playstyle, create a new outfit, complete a faction questline or find a boss that I’m yet to defeat. It feels like the game has endless possibilities, although I know that I’ll get to a point when this statement is no longer true.

Why Siow Loves Crimson Desert

For me, the game caters to my irrational need to be tanky and succeed. This in turn allows me to explore the world more freely without worrying too much about any surprise encounters. To expand upon that:

Weapon Usage in Combat

I like the ability to quickly swap weapons and armor in combat with the radial menu. Granted I do that significantly more for weapons than armor, it’s still a nice feature to have. Being able to go from a shield one moment to a longsword the next is a smooth and fun process.

I love the large shields in particular because I can keep my shield up while stabbing at my enemy. If I ever needed to, I could whittle away at groups of enemies this was like some one-man phalanx.

With a good amount of weapon choices and different abilities to choose from, it’ll be a while before combat gets stale. You can always try a different weapon entirely or just ditch them to go unarmed!

Spirit and Axiom Force Abilities

Both Spirit and Axiom Force abilities are both useful and fun to use. This game takes a lot of inspiration from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom in terms of exploration mechanics. One thing Crimson Desert does compared to these games is expand upon them.

For example, the Aerial Maneuver with the Axiom Arc is an incredibly useful ability for quickly scaling walls or getting a headstart on a long climb. These are also fun in combat to pull a Scorpion from Mortal Kombat when you use Axiom Force to pull enemies to you.

My favorite spirit ability is easily Force Palm. It’s always good for opening up enemies and it’s always useful to use mid-combos against bosses. Managing to pull off a triple Force Palm on a boss means that their yellow bar will get filled quite significantly, meaning they can be stunned and left open to attack.

The Cooking System

As someone with a Culinary Arts degree, I always love when there’s a video game with good looking food in it. Crimson Desert and its delicious looking Braised Ribs are no exception. The sheer amount of what you can cook can be overwhelming, but being able to fine tune the ingredients to offer specific bonuses is a good touch.

Why Endonae Loves Crimson Desert

I agree with what everyone else has said, but I have to pick 3 things, or this would go on forever, so I’ve chosen to highlight resource gathering, boss fights, and the industrial era.

Resource Gathering

I tend to hate resource gathering and crafting mechanics in video games, but Pearl Abyss managed to make it fun and engaging.

I think that’s largely due to how the resource nodes are woven into the landscape so seamlessly while still managing to look enticing and offer a bit of challenge.

It feels good when you come across an ore vein a have learned from past mining experience to discern the stuff that’s worth digging up from the low-grade stuff that would take too much effort and refining to bother with.

Picking flowers and herbs is the same way. You’re almost literally separating the wheat from the chaff, and that takes a keen eye.

There’s even difficulty scaling with it as the more valuable materials are harder to differentiate both because the imperfections are less discernable and you don’t encounter them as often.

The sheer scarcity of the good stuff in the early game makes it feels exhilarating when you spot something like a Diamond or Palmar Leaf, and just when it starts becoming repetitive, the game gives you some way to speed it up or improve yields.

Boss Fights

The boss fights in Crimson Desert have been controversial, but I personally appreciate that they feel like proper threats and are clearly balanced around all the tools the rest of the game gives you. It does not feel cheap to rely on all the OP abilities you get.

You can look at a game like Elden Ring that takes the opposite approach. Healing is extremely deliberate and part of the core gameplay. You have to wait for an opening where it’s safe to take a swig from your flask.

Crimson Desert lets you chug food that can refill your health with a negligibly short rate limit. If Crimson Desert’s bosses had the same kind of openings as they need to have in Elden Ring, they would be pushovers.

I’m glad that Crimson Desert’s boss fights are balanced to expect you to take a bite of food in between every single hit of a boss’ combo, and the same goes for other parallels like Spirit Ashes, Physicks, and Co-op next to Elixirs and Nature’s Snare.

Difficulty settings are necessary with this approach. Elden Ring is able to avoid having such settings as a result of offering so many ways to make the game easier, and while they weren’t available at launch, Pearl Abyss did add difficulty modes for Crimson Desert.

Of course, it takes a great combat system to accomplish something like this, and Crimson Desert has achieved that. It is incredible how much depth and accessibility the combat has, and impressive how natural it feels on a controller, but sadly, I digress.

Factories and Industrialization

I’m cheating a bit here by lumping together the factory puzzles with industrialization worldbuilding.

Other open world games have taken place in a similar era, like RDR2 and Horizon: Zero Dawn, but I think Crimson Desert’s take is unique and most effective at conveying the dizzying technological advancements taking place across the globe during the industrial revolution at the turn of the 19th century.

It’s more geographically compressed, but if you look at the world during the 1700s and 1800s, you had tribal states like Pailune getting conquered or undermined in candlelight by Victorian era imperialists like Demeniss just as electricity was discovered and transforming countries like Delesyia with hulking machines, automating away the way work had been for centuries.

If Kliff wasn’t such a himbo, he’d probably be having a mental breakdown from seeing so much technological advancement while traveling the world. Maybe the magic helps take the edge off.

A side-effect of setting the game in the era of industrialization is the factory puzzles you get to do. I adored reviving the machinery at places Arboria Castle and Gearheart Confectionary.

I can’t remember getting to see or do something like that since Tick Tock Clock in Super Mario 64.

Deciphering the manual and all the notes was really fun, unlike the sometimes-mandatory investigation quests. It’s unfortunate that Pearl Abyss felt it necessary to implement little tutorial walkthroughs for the former rather than the latter.

Why Vulkk Loves Crimson Desert

It’s been a very long time since I was so engulfed by a video game. I think the last one that did this to me was Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. I am going to highlight only three of my top 100 favorite things about Crimson Desert.

Environments and Puzzles

I do not play puzzle games, although I spent a lot of time on the Crazy Machines Puzzles in a different decade… Yet, there is something that attracts me to exploring and learning secrets about the environment and world’s lore in games. I enjoyed solving puzzles and uncovering secrets in the latest Assassin’s Creed games. I love doing it in Crimson Desert too.

My country (Bulgaria) is known for its stunning and incredibly diverse nature. If I am unable to enjoy it in person (it’s Spring now and often rains), I can easily substitute this with the gorgeous vistas Crimson Desert has to offer.

The game does an almost perfect job of always distracting me with something other than whatever I originally planned to do. I often stumble on random ruins, mystical places, or crazy vistas.

Feeling of Power (in both directions)

In a lot of modern games, the progress of your character is strictly tied to the story and/or regions you visit. This applies even to many open-world games, sadly. But not here.

Crimson Desert can throw at me an incredibly powerful being, like Beloth, in my first 30 hours, when I am totally not ready for this challenge. That thing stomped me like a bug. When I returned (much later) to tackle him for real, I came prepared and I swept him.

I had already acquired many Abyss Artifacts and upgraded armor and weapons. I was also more drunk on elixirs than even Geralt could imagine.

The developers advertised this complete freedom to go and do whatever you want, but I had not felt it personally until I faced Beloth.

It gives me great joy being able to overcome tough challenges, but when I meet my own limits (I refuse to cheat or cheese bosses), I can always store the challenge for a later time, do other things and return to do it again.

The Story (Shocking, I know!)

While I was doing the story, it frustrated me, it bored me, it annoyed me, and it angered me. It was not a great experience.

The story in Crimson Desert is told in a very uneven pace and most of it feels incredibly disconnected while you are doing it.

At the very end, when I set out to clear as many challenges for achievements as I possibly could, I discovered the Books at the Axiom Library.

These books bridge most of the gaps and questions left unanswered during the main storyline of Crimson Desert.

I don’t know if the developers intended to be vague with the narrative and purposefully leave these large gaps, but after I read the six books, almost everything fell into its place. I was finally able to see the big picture. The story is interesting and deep, but quite poorly presented and served to us.

Suddenly, my mind let go of all this frustration and I decided I will accept that the best part of the game is not its story, but now that I at least understood it…

I loved it!

Why YOU loved Crimson Desert?

This title has so much to offer to so many players with different tastes. It’s easy to keep picking aspects we loved. But we have to put a limit to this or nobody would sit down to read it. And we want you to read it, and share the joy of playing this title.

Would you like to share why you loved the game and what made you spend all those (hundreds of) hours with it? We’d love to hear your top picks.