izigame.me

I should probably preface this review with a few caveats. Obviously I am a huge Dune fan, notice the handle and profile picture, so there was literally zero chance I was not going to play this game. The flip side of this is that survival games are really not my jam and on top of that my experiences with Funcom have been resoundingly meh - Age of Conan had a great start on the island of Tortuga but dropped off steeply after that, and The Secret World just did not draw me in despite its promising premise. So I was interested to see how these two points were going to react with each other, the unstoppable force of fandom meeting the immovable object of mediocrity. I am pleased to report that this game succeeds in evoking the Dune Universe for me while at the same time providing me with a satisfying gameplay loop.
There is actually a plot which kind of surprises me, and they made the good decision to kick off with an alternate-universe Dune where Lady Jessica provides Leto with a daughter (like she was told to by the Bene Gesserit) rather than a son. The upshot of this decision is that Yueh failed to betray Leto and the battle of Arrakeen was fought to a standstill. Most of the Fremen are dead, killed by the Sardaukar, and the main plot has you looking for their remnants while you decide if you are going to pick sides in the ongoing war of the Atreides vs the Harkonnen. You start the game as a prisoner but your prison ship is destroyed by a mysterious benefactor and after your crash landing you have to scrabble for survival on Arrakis.
Funcom does a great job balancing the survival aspect of things with the combat/RPG aspect. You do have to kind of struggle to survive, especially early on in the game where finding water and staying hydrated is a real pain in the arse, especially if you are foolish enough to stay in the sun which will rapidly give you sunstroke. There are plenty of resources to harvest and the harvesting of those resources is made slightly more interesting by turning it into a mini-game where you have to laser a specific wiggly line in order to blow up the thing and turn it into goodies. A lot of stuff you have to get by killing bad guys and fortunately there are plenty of those as well in camps big and small, as well as some pretty long dungeon type areas filled with treasure and enemies. While it would seem on a desert planet that traveling/adventuring at night is the way to go, unfortunately patrol ships full of Sardaukar are looking for you at night and if they catch you it can be kind of scary as you get stuck in a tractor beam for a bit and then have to fight some professional troops. And of course if you are traveling across the sand you always run the risk of attracting a big sandworm who thinks of you as a tasty snack. It's all a lot of fun and the game gives you plenty to do, so much in fact that it's difficult to put the game down.
There is a leveling system - you gain xp every time you kill someone or harvest something (even if it's just picking something off the ground) and if you get enough to level up you acquire both research points (which govern what you can build) and skill points (which go into skill trees that you use to get bonuses to both combat and non-combat abilities as well as special powers). You pick a class to start the game but later on you can find trainers that will help you learn the skills of other classes so you don't feel too hemmed in. It feels good to level up and I read that the level cap is 200 so you don't have to worry about reaching it for a long time (I am 46 as of this writing). There is a button you can press to respec, but I have never pressed it.
The combat is surprisingly well done, balanced well between melee and ranged, shielded and unshielded. You get plenty of new combat abilities although you can only equip 2 active ones (there's a third slot, but it's been locked for me) and because of the existence of shielded enemies and their special powers it is actually fairly dynamic, much more so than I was expecting. It is naturally all in real time so get your reflexes ready. There is PvP in a few places - so far the only place I have found with PvP enabled was a crashed ship that had a bunch of resources in it that were otherwise pretty hard to get, but it turns out you can buy those resources at another outpost with enough solaris so even if you are not great at PvP you won't get locked out of certain items.
Characters move pretty well, you can dodge and jump and the trooper even has a starting ability that lets him hook people and things and then instantly pull himself close to whatever he hooked, which is obviously great for traversal. There are lots of items that let you jump, glide, and fall better, and you can climb by default. There are also vehicles you can build, and you probably should to try and get across those big stretches of desert without being eaten by a sandworm.
Dying is not normally that big of a deal - if you get downed you have a self-revive which can be pretty handy, and even if that fails you get to keep most of your equipment, all you lose are your solaris (money) which you can get back by running to where you died, Souls-style. The only exception to this is when you get eaten by a sandworm. If that happens to you, you will lose everything you had on you and it's gone forever. This happened to me once and I would be lying if I said it felt good, but on the other hand it does make sense that the gigantic sandworms would be the most fearsome things in the game and this is a good way of simulating that. In my explorations I found a blueprint for a rare pair of shoes that make it much less likely for you to attract a worm and you better believe I am wearing those all the time now.
Overall I have been very much enjoying the time I have spent on Arrakis and I am really fanboyishly happy to be playing a Mentat in one of my favorite franchises of all time. Funcom has been really hit or miss but I think they might have hit the sweet spot on this one. If you are a fan of Dune, survival games, or MMOs I would definitely check this out.