Black Desert Critic Reviews

Black Desert won’t be to everybody’s tastes, and does little to push the MMO genre forward. With that said, it does streamline the experience into a more familiar shell, its real-time combat and impeccable UI tweaks helping it fit onto a console with the minimal of fuss. Its quest structure is lacking in variation, and it doesn’t have the complex characters of The Witcher 3, but it’s a world that is great to explore with friends, with the promise of more to come.

Black Desert manages to surprise us with great features like its deep character editor and a very dynamic and varied combat system, with a rich world that's a pleasure to explore. On the other side, though, an overly complicated interface, some technical problems and a too repetitive mission structure keep it from reaching its full potential.

It’s cool to be the hero you were meant to become in a pretty world, but Black Desert is lacking in the meat of other classic MMOs and requires a hefty grind.

It is easily the best of its kind to be found on the Xbox One and thanks to the tweaking and simplification of the combat for the system, it's a game that feels right at home on consoles.

Black Desert is a great MMORPG, but it needs more technical polish on Xbox One. Even on Xbox One X, it's far from perfect due to its lighting and performance problems. Unfortunately, it also lacks a lot of the content found on the PC version. Pearl Abyss has promised a series of updates which will bring over new regions and features, but it's unclear how long that will take.

Black Desert could be an incredible MMO experience, but the lacklustre story, uninspiring quests, overly bland characters and the low difficulty of combat drag it down quite a bit. Should these drawbacks not deter you, then visiting its expansive and colourful world might be worth it.