Recent reviews by basics :)

The game could be something truly special in 12+ months, but right now it is one of the worst launches I've ever seen from a game.

That sounds a bit dramatic, and depending on what you're looking for from the game, it is. The first ~80 hours of the game are awesome (if you're lucky and don't have any awful bugs hit you). After that, get ready to wake up to your base and everything you've farmed for your entire playthrough to be deleted simply because of a dumb mistake by the devs. They'll give you an "oopsies! we didn't mean to do that! sorry!" but they'll also give you a "we don't plan to do anything about it though so deal with it! the 100+ hours you spent farming all that stuff is not something we care about so bye bye!".

Their coding practices have some very clear and major flaws. These are problems that the industry solved over 20 years ago, but Funcom decided they didn't want to apply any of it. It's trivial to dupe items. It's trivial to steal items and vehicles from inside of other players' bases. It's trivial to move at the speed of light. Any other halfway decent game will have the sense to make the server the authority and have the server sanity check what the clients are claiming happened. Not Dune though.

You fly around with your most valuable items (which the game design actively forces you to do multiple times per week), but each time you do it, you're at the mercy of a bug that will randomly delete those items. A bug they have claimed to have fixed several times, but clearly hasn't been. You store your items at your base and go to sleep, but best of luck because any cheater can steal whatever they want from your storage chests.

If you value your time, reach endgame and then put the game away. Check back in a year and maybe the game will be worth spending more time on, but the devs certainly aren't inspiring much hope.

A truly fantastic game. I rarely ever get into single player games and when I do, it's almost never a story-driven one. KCD2 and Horizon Zero Dawn are the only games I've ever played where the story had me genuinely interested and invested.

I would like to highlight one small part of that game that is annoying me though: Masters difficulty archery competition. In the archery competitions:

- Whoever finishes shooting all of their arrows first gets a bonus 3 points.
- If you miss the bullseye, you get 3 fewer points.
- In the event of a tie, the player who finished shooting their arrows first gets the win.

These three rules in the game combine into something very toxic when the game adds "cheating" npcs who shoot faster than you possibly can (even with the faster shooting perk). These npcs show up in ~1/3 of my matches and they literally make it impossible to win. They always either miss 0 bullseyes or miss 1 bullseye and (most importantly) they shoot faster than a player possibly can. So even if you hit every single bullseye, you end up losing outright or losing to the tie-breaker.

I suspect the devs added this intentionally as a way to combat people trying to farm the archery competitions for profit. But it results in robbing the player of the satisfaction that should come from doing something perfectly and makes the actual competition a lot less intense since ~1/3 of the time, you're automatically losing anyways.

Absolutely great game fundamentally with a lot of potential, however due to very sloppy code and plenty of head-scratch inducing design decisions, the game is not currently worth spending any time on let alone money. Check back in a year to see if they've cleaned up all of the bugs, added fun content, and taken the game in the right direction before everybody lost faith and interest.

The game is quite fun, but I can't figure out why the devs didn't add a driving range. I would love to be able to efficiently practice my swings to get the hang of swing power + hitting the ball straight, but the only option as far as I can tell is just playing a normal round of golf. The game would be a lot better and I'd spend a lot more time in it if they added a range that showed your swing stats immediately after each swing.

(And if the devs are reading this, the range could also benefit from being able to quickly skip to the next shot whenever you want. For example, you just hit the ball, immediately display any swing stats (power, how straight it was, etc.) and then you can press a button to immediately be ready to take your next shot instead of having to wait for your first shot to hit the ground and stop rolling etc.)