The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was one of the best games of 2023, and I’ve been waiting for some time for more games to tap into the same thrilling energy that it had. When I went hands-on with Crimson Desert, a new open-world action adventure game from the developers of Black Desert Online, at Summer Game Fest Play Days this year, I felt like I was playing the first true successor to Tears of the Kingdom.
It’s not a direct one-to-one comparison, though. Crimson Desert doesn’t feature anything quite as complex as the Ultrahand construction system and is much more bloody and mature than anything Nintendo would ever do with Zelda. Still, if you’re looking for a maximalist action-adventure game that takes cues from fantastic open-world games like Tears of the Kingdom, then Crimson Desert should be on your radar.
In Crimson Desert, players control Kliff, a powerful warrior and leader of a group called the Greymanes. I didn’t get to see much of the broader story, as my Summer Game Fest demo plopped me into a massive battle against a rebellion that takes place somewhere in the middle of the game’s story. To start, I helped the army I sided with prepare by restoring cannons and destroying enemy cannons. Then, a full-on battle broke out and I had to help turn the tide by killing powerful enemies, freeing prisoners, disabling siege machines, and more.
These missions, while linear and direct with their objectives, did expose the complexities of the player’s move set and Crimson Desert’s sandbox of an open-world. There are a lot of different kinds of attacks for players to use and combos to create, with the developers at the demo station directly bringing up Tekken as a point of comparison. Crimson Desert is also completely maximalist and brutal in its action. I brutally chopped limbs off the enemies I was facing, or fired a single arrow to completely decimate a bigger group with a fiery barrage.
By pressing down on both control sticks, players can activate an Axiom Force that Kliff can use for multiple things. One of these uses is picking up objects, although the same force is needed if you want to grapple to a certain point around the open world. Once you’re at a high point, Kliff can use his magical abilities to glide around. During a battle, that energy can be infused into a Force Palm attack to stun enemies. There are also several objects that can be picked up and thrown around the world, and lots of structures that can be destroyed if you do enough damage to them.
The moments where that sandbox played right into and complemented combat reminded me of the high points of Tears of the Kingdom, albeit in a much more bloody and mature way. I think Crimson Desert will appeal to a more hardcore kind of gamer, one interested in learning fighting game-like combos and who enjoys the grim worlds of The Witcher or Dark Souls. The bosses I faced during the demo were no slouches either. The final one, a traitor named Cassius Morten, was particularly tough as he wouldn’t really take much damage unless I got him to knock down a pillar, stunned him, and then used the Axiom Force to bash him in the head with the pillar.
This demo only scratches the surface of what Crimson Desert will have to offer, as I didn’t see much of its open-world or all of the other chaos shown off in its previous gameplay trailers and videos. I’m looking forward to spending more time with Crimson Desert to truly dig into its complexities. And if you’re the kind of person who likes large-scale open-world action adventure games like Tears of the Kingdom, I think you should be looking forward to this game as well.
Crimson Desert will be released later this year for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
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