The boss fights in Crimson Deserts are spectacular, if a bit overwhelming.

Crimson Desert stole the show at last year’s Gamescom Opening Night Live with a trailer that featured everything from sword and shield combat to fishing, arm wrestling in a tavern, dog petting, playing a flute, carrying goats, taming horses, climbing monsters, and more. However, while the game was playable at Gamescom last week, Pearl Abyss (creator of Black Desert Online) decided to show a much more focused demo.

If you didn’t know any better, you might come out of this demo thinking that Crimson Desert is a Souls-like boss rush, as during our hour with the game we were taken from the brief opening sequence to four bosses midway through the game. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem—getting up to speed with the game’s controller layout and mechanics during the demo is part of the job—but several of these bosses seemed to lack important context about their weaknesses and mechanics that we would have learned about earlier in the story or by traveling around the open world.

As a result, almost every journalist I spoke to at the show described having a PR guy hovering over them, trying to explain the rather complicated mechanics and boss strategies, telling us to use certain gear or aim for scarecrows in the arena rather than the boss itself. That’s not a bad thing in itself, but it’s an odd choice for a vertical slice, especially in an open-world game, and the game’s creators seemed to be aware of that, providing us with hundreds of healing items in our inventory to try and help us out in this demo.

It’s often unhelpful to describe a game as being like another game but with (blank space), but in this case it really feels like the team has combined mechanics and design philosophies from other games to create what’s here. While Crimson Desert has stamina bars and focuses heavily on defense and parrying, it’s also much faster than FromSoft’s games, and enemies will come at you quickly. On top of that, attacks are much more animated and exaggerated than in From’s game, which is a bit reminiscent of the stylish combat in Devil May Cry. Also in keeping with more traditional action games, there’s no manual blocking, meaning you’re more or less at the camera’s command when it comes to who you can target.

All of these different mechanics come together to make boss fights quite challenging. The acts are fast-paced and there’s a temptation to start mashing, but you’re also limited by the animations, and because enemy attacks are equally fast and often chain together, you can quickly find yourself taking a ton of damage and running out of stamina to escape. This was particularly difficult in the opening sequence, where we had to fight off a brutal enemy tribe leader while his foot soldiers surrounded us, giving us little breathing room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz2m_k6L1q4

If that wasn’t enough, the final boss we encountered was the Queen Stoneback Crab. This monster was several times larger than us and was basically a walking hill. To defeat it, we had to climb and jump over it, grappling and stabbing at weak points, much like in Dragon’s Dogma or Shadow of the Colossus. In fact, the encounter started to feel like something out of Monster Hunter, as it lasted so long that our demo ended before we could land the final blow.

While that may sound negative, a weak demo doesn’t mean the game will be bad, and there were a lot of interesting things to do. One boss fight in the snow was particularly fun because it took the tricks out of the game and we were just learning the monsters’ attack patterns and getting into the rhythm of the fight.

It’s hard to judge Crimson Desert at this stage, as the demo left us with more questions than before, but we’re curious to see what the future holds.