My first attempt to reach space in the Dual Universe ended in disaster. I bought a space bike, which is the cheapest viable spacecraft that Novaquark’s ridiculously ambitious space simulator offers, with the intention of making a test flight from the planet Alioth to one of its nearby moons. But through a combination of ignorance and ineptitude, I was unable to escape the planet’s gravitational pull and ended up crashing 60 kilometers from the nearest transport.

In Dual Universe, distance is measured on a 1-to-1 scale, and without the resources to repair my bike, I was faced with the prospect of a two-hour journey back to civilization. Having already struggled with the game's byzantine systems at seemingly every turn, I was tempted to write it off altogether.

After a bit of a huff, I sat down and got on with it. And while it wasn’t exactly thrilling, that long journey home proved to be more interesting than I expected. You see, the planets and major moons of the Dual Universe aren’t uniform in terms of environment, and as I traveled, I passed wind-sculpted deserts, lush forests, and grassy plains. I also saw plenty of player-built structures, from prefab homes to elaborate industrial complexes, all with spaceships parked nearby. At one point, I spent fifteen minutes traveling across the bottom of a lake and came across several player-built installations that had been built beneath the waves.

It gave me a sense of what was happening elsewhere in the world, and when I finally returned to civilization, I was inspired to continue. And that kind of encapsulates what it’s like to play Dual Universe. It’s a murky, regularly frustrating, and arguably unfinished experience. But hidden beneath the tangled mess of its many systems are moments of vision.

The sky is the limit

Broadly speaking, Dual Universe is a hybrid of EVE Online, No Man's Sky, and Factorio, with a little bit of Minecraft thrown in for good measure. It aims to be a fully simulated, player-driven sandbox, giving players the tools to build their own structures, design their own ships, and create their own interstellar companies that are part of a dynamic economy.

You’re literally dropped into this universe as a lone pioneer, given a patch of territory to claim as your own on the game’s starting moon of Haven, before descending to your chosen terrain via orbital ship. You then set up your initial habitat (I chose a futuristic Flash village with its own miniature runway), deploy your starting vehicle, a speeder, and get a crash course in how the game’s voxel-based creative tools work.

From here, you are theoretically free to do whatever you want and start building your legend within the Helios system. In practice, you will probably be stuck in the ground figuring out what you he must doing. Dual Universe’s learning curve is more of a launch trajectory, with countless interconnected systems to learn early in the game. Building, mining, crafting, laying industrial pipelines, two different types of flight mechanics, the labyrinthine talent system that dictates a huge amount of what you can and can’t do in different professions. Even something as ostensibly simple as buying and selling items in the market has its own tutorial that you go need to go through.

It’s a daunting prospect, and the great irony of it is that what you’re supposed to be doing at this early stage is very simple: break rocks. Planets are littered with randomly generated surface ores that can be mined with your universal multi-tool. These ores are the baseline from which more complex materials are developed, but they can also be sold in bulk for a small but easily achievable income. Once you’ve got a few hundred dollars under your belt, you can purchase autonomous mining units that extract ore passively and can also be calibrated roughly once a day to yield a fat chunk of ore.

The problem with doing this is that eBay doesn't exist in Dual Universe. To sell anything in the game, you have to take it to the market like a medieval peasant. And depending on where you initially planted your flag, your starting point might be 20, 50, even 100 kilometers from the nearest market, which is a long trip in your starting speeder. Consequently, Dual Universe's opening hours are a pretty miserable routine as you drive to the market, drop off a big bag of rocks, go home, mine more rocks, and then drop them off again.

There are a few ways to get around this systemic gang. You can buy a new Territory Control Unit and take a shuttle to the planet Alioth, where you can claim a new piece of land that has rarer and more valuable ores. But while claiming your first piece of land on a new planet is free, that land is subject to a weekly tax of 500,000 units (or two to four hours of surface ore mining). I don’t understand why the game does this. If it’s to prevent people from claiming land they don’t use, Novaquark could simply have the game disable your claim after, say, not logging in for a week. Arbitrarily taxing players on imaginary lands with a fictional centralized body is absolutely baffling.

The alternative is to use your ore in a crafting project, the results of which you can then use or sell on the market. But there are two issues here. First, making anything remotely useful in Dual Universe requires multiple processes, and unlike Factorio, which starts you at the beginning and works methodically through each process, here you start with what you want to make, before working backwards to figure out how to do it, which is difficult when something as simple as a storage container has nearly a dozen nested components. Oh, and everything you craft by hand has a timer attached to it. If you want to build an assembler so you can start automating the crafting process, it’ll take you about an hour of crafting to go from raw materials to finished product.

System shock

The other issue is that even after you make something, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to sell it. As I mentioned, Dual Universe’s economy is driven by its players. But as a new game with a fairly small player base, the economy hasn’t had a chance to establish itself yet, so it’s hard to know what you should make and where you should sell it.

In short, every system is overwhelmed and unwieldy. At the same time, there’s a nagging feeling that, despite having launched at v1.0, Dual Universe isn’t truly finished. The playable area is currently limited to a single star system, with the “Space” section of the game’s map menu grayed out. The planets you explore are topographically beautiful but largely inert, with no weather systems and no fauna beyond a few pixel-shaded birds and butterflies. The handful of rudimentary delivery missions the game offers feel like a rushed attempt to compensate for the lack of curated experiences.

Basically, getting anything off the ground in Dual Universe is a lot of hard work and only intermittently fun. Anything, that is, except the ships themselves. Honestly, of all the mistakes Dual Universe makes, the biggest one is not immediately pointing you to the nearest ship vendor and getting you into the air as quickly as possible, because flying in this game is splendid.

Dual Universe’s flight model leans towards simulation without straying and colliding with the control tower for realism. Ships are relatively simple to control, but handling is influenced by factors such as engine power, fuel type, momentum, gravity, and even the mass of inventory you’re currently carrying. Consequently, even simple hops from your home to the local market require careful and attentive flying, as you need to monitor your altitude to avoid colliding with terrain and carefully adjust your speed as you approach the landing bay, while also keeping an eye out for other player ships that may be parked or landing/taking off.

Flying between planets is even better. Taking off from the surface of a planet is a tricky business, as the planet’s gravity tries to hold you down, while the thin air makes it hard to maintain altitude. Get it right, though, and your speed will quickly increase from hundreds of miles per hour to tens of thousands. Spaceflight itself is all about managing your acceleration and deceleration, as at high speeds it can take several minutes to slow down, and if you start that process too late, you’ll crash into the planet like a dart.

Aside from some LOD pop-in on planets, the whole thing is completely flawless. In fact, it's one of the best examples of seamless space-planet flight I've ever seen in a game. If you're piloting a hybrid ship (which can do both space and planetary flight), for example, there's a wonderful moment where your blue atmospheric engines shut down and your orange space thrusters slowly kick in, pushing you out into the void.

Dual Universe has its problems. It tries to merge a wide range of systems, but it doesn’t do any of them as well as the games from which these ideas are borrowed. Its difficulty curve is so steep that many players will slip long before they see the game at its best. Doing pretty much anything requires you to go through seventeen different stages, one of which you’ll inevitably miss and then have to start the whole process over again. But hidden beneath all that is a pleasantly tangible space simulator with some powerful creation tools and a genuinely great flying experience. It’s certainly not for everyone, but it’s not a bad one either, and for a certain type of brain, juggling all its convolutions will be absolute catnip.