When a friend showed me a trailer for Crimson Desert, I was a bit bemused. He was excited because it looked like a mix of “The Witcher 3 and a Souls game”. I wasn’t planning to buy the game, but a key came free with my new graphics card: So here I am reviewing a game that cost me nothing, but on paper offers nearly everything.

Crimson Desert opens with gruff fightin’ man Kliff sitting down for a bit of dinner and bickering with his friends and fellow Greymanes, a clan of warriors who go around helping out across the land. Suddenly they’re attacked by the Black Bears, a rival clan who love a bit of slaughter and mayhem after tea, and before we know it we’re overwhelmed, chucked into a river and rescued by a mysterious force. Saved from the brink of death, Kliff must journey the lands to reunite his clan mates and retake his home of Pailune, all while mastering his mysterious new powers to stop the world from falling into irreversible chaos.

Crimson Desert offers very little in the way of an original story: The opening is very by the numbers, but the hook of reuniting your clan while also saving the world from falling apart had some initial promise. However, the immediate cluttering of the game with an absolute deluge of stuff promptly stamps that fire out.

The opening of the game suffers with a severe overabundance of tutorials, something I’ve still not cleared at time of writing. The initial intrigue set up by the plot is mixed with a tutorial that teaches you the basics of your Axiom powers, used for both combat and puzzle-solving. Once you’re let loose into the world, each of the many systems you engage with comes with a short tutorial via prompts or on-screen text to read – which is absolutely understandable – but these are then re-hashed by many of the quests you do, which serve as plodding, hollow tutorials meant to introduce you to the same gambling or horse-racing system you did ten hours ago.

The news around town is that developer Pearl Abyss initially worked on this game as an MMO prequel to their long-running MMO Black Desert Online, pivoting at some point during development to a single-player action-RPG instead. As someone who is mostly uninterested in MMOs, there’s a lot of that initial DNA left in Crimson Desert; chiefly in the sheer, mind-numbing number of inconsequential systems and content. It’s both impressive and off-putting how much there is to do in the game: It’s really fun to come across some of these systems for the first time through exploration and experimentation, but disappointing in how little effect each system has on anything else.

Before I continue with the negativity, there are some things Crimson Desert has going for it. The game looks and sounds lovely, with surprisingly good optimisation considering how much is happening at any one time. The developers have continued to support the game post-launch with a series of swiftly delivered updates targeting both bug fixes and addition of, or refinement to, content in the game: While I don’t like it, I am impressed by the amount of stuff shoved into the game.

Apart from the MMO-like nature of having tons of busywork systems, the game is certainly…heavily inspired by many other big titles from the last decade or so. Combat is approximate to The Witcher 3 with a cheap, Dark Souls-like approach to big boss fights. Exploration takes place with a mixture of Witcher horse-riding and Zelda-style gliding. Later into the game, you can actually unlock two other playable characters in a blatant copy of Grand Theft Auto V’s approach, right down to the animation for switching between them. There are systems for base & clan management, house decorating and cosmetic customisation that is probably “inspired” by many other games I haven’t played: Whether this constitutes a smart, curation-style approach to game design or plagiarism is up to you, but it all leads to Crimson Desert having no stand out identity. I’ve heard the classic “Get to X mission/ It gets good after Y amount of hours!” but to be blunt, I don’t care – I’ve tried getting back into it after a few weeks’ break, and I just can’t force myself when I’d rather be playing something much more focused and engaging.

To describe Crimson Desert as soulless might be overdoing it, but it’s such an “everything game” that it really fails to shine in any one area. While there’s some impressive aspects to it, for me Crimson Desert ultimately falls flat and lacks that real X-factor that helps it stand out from the now-tired genre of open-world sandbox games.

And there you have it folks – as mentioned, this game is so packed that I may revisit it later and find something worth engaging with/ writing about again. In the meantime, my quest to actually get out to the cinema continues, and I’m eagerly awaiting the upcoming character DLC for Warhammer 40,000: Darktide in June. As always I can be found on Letterboxd, Ko-Fi and (very rarely these days) on Twitter. Until next time, dear readers, take care!