Crimson Desert is an unrestrained feast of violence, with a toolkit of moves that's like a fusion of every action RPG protagonist of the past decade rolled into one

I had the joy of playing Crimson Desert, the first proper singleplayer effort by Black Desert Online developer Pearl Abyss, again this week—and while I had some sense of how the game works, given I played it during Gamescom last year, getting my hands on it in an air-conditioned London building rather than a stuffy, loud hall in Copenhagen allowed me to stare deeper into the action RPG tesseract, and I've come away with my head spinning.

The elevator pitch for Crimson Desert sounds a bit dry: You play as Kliff, a gruff fantasy mercenary in an archetypical fantasy setting, and leader of the Greymane Free Company. A bunch of vikings rock up and, best I can tell, kill most of them. You get stabbed but not killed, and eventually set out on a quest to deliver some payback in a wide open world, yada yada.

In terms of how Kliff plays, though? He's basically every action RPG protagonist of the past decade smushed into one guy. This boy can fit so many combat systems in his grim, slightly northern-accented body.

I've only had two hours total with Crimson Desert, and here's a list of the things I think Kliff can do on top of the usual RPG meat and potatoes of having a dodge roll, a light attack, a heavy attack, and a block:

• Punt people like you're a Spartan with a bone to pick.
• Parry with your sword.
• Parry with your shield.
• Sidestep.
• Flash your sword to blind enemies.
• Do a sidestep slash with your sword by hitting light and heavy attack at the same time.
• Command grab someone to contextually either suplex or chokeslam them.

(Deep breaths. We're halfway there).

• Charge up a supernatural powerfist.
• Do a Max-Payne style slow-mo dodge with your bow.
• Use that powerfist to launch yourself into the air and pull off some Breath of the Wild tier nonsense with said bow.
• While you're up there, you can also go full Red Dead Redemption and mark multiple targets for death.
• Equip different elemental arrow types, because why not.
• Glide in the air on a cloak of shadow.
• Swing around someone like spider-man with a grappling hook of some kind.
• Some button combo I didn't get a chance to test, just labelled "Stab."

Now, granted, the 12-minute tutorial video I watched before I hopped in was, by Pearl Abyss's own admission, not exactly the best way to go about learning all of this stuff. Presumably, the game will slowly trickle these power-ups to you, and tell you where to use them.

However, in trailers and demonstrative gameplay, I've seen combos I couldn't even suss out—and I want to point out that the massive list I just shared are the basic actions you can do. The building blocks of your ultraviolence. I couldn't tell you how many permutations of war you can wreak upon your enemy when you start learning how to string them together.

I fought four bosses during my preview: The Staglord and the Queen Stoneback—who I'm familiar with from Gamescom—as well as two new bosses, The Reed Devil and Hexie Marie. All of these big bads felt very different to brawl with, requiring different tools in your Swiss Army knife. The Staglord could be stopped dead with my big powerful magic punch, the Reed Devil got stomped with my sidestep slash, and Hexie Marie's legion of pot-men were allergic to explosive arrows.

The best thing about Crimson Desert by far—which I'm glad to see hasn't been diminished since my Gamescom experience—is how utterly frenetic the combat is. Hexie Marie, in particular, seemed predisposed to summon two dozen pottery men and hurl them at me at any given time. The Staglord, also, hasn't become any less proficient at sending me rag-dolling into a pillar with gusto.

I can't make promises of the open world, or the equipment system, or even the story, as I've seen precious little of all three, though I am promised high double-digit, maybe even triple digit gameplay hours, with all the expected activities that conjures. But the combat, bare minimum, is joyfully unrestrained.

Kliff is an everything bagel with some absurd combo potential on par with any fighting game character—and I have a mighty itch to lab out those combos on my own time, something an action RPG rarely ever inspires in me.

The cutscenes, meanwhile, are fully invested in the same nonsense. It's like a high-fantasy wuxia martial arts movie wearing a Witcher 3/Game of Thrones skinsuit, and you know what? It's great. Any time the cinematic bars settled in, and Kliff started spinning around like Bruce Lee with a sword and shield, my inner 14 year old squealed with glee. It lies in the exact intersection between dumb and cool to send every neuron I have firing.

I don't know if Crimson Desert will even be a cohesive game—it's possible that Pearl Abyss is taking on too many systems, and what we'll end up with is a confusing mess. But if you like action RPG combat, deep combo systems, and punting people into bonfires, you're going to have some kind of fun here. Crimson Desert is poised to release in late 2025.

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