Dual Universe allows players to mark their names in an expansive colony. The ambitious Kickstarter game has officially launched after a few years of development and early access. Unfortunately, developers Novaquark have released a hollow universe of mistakes and failed promises with an unflattering subscription model that has already put this game back into cryosleep.

Space is boundless

A colony awakens ten thousand years after Earth’s demise. With new land, planets, and a galaxy to uncover, players take the role of one of these many settlers with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild society.

The universe shapers

After first launching Dual Universe, players are greeted with a handful of basic tutorials that take roughly 30 minutes. Sadly, they don’t explain the entirety of the depth of voxel building and other systems in the game. Depending on your experience with these creative online games, watching several additional hours of YouTube tutorial videos is compulsory to understand what to do and how to do it. Even after all that, players may still need to ask other travelers in the game for support. Dual Universe is a massive playground of possibilities but can be frustratingly complex.

Building the first home base is where the usability of crafting tools becomes an inherent problem. Erecting structures around a base is annoying, clunky and not as straightforward as expected. Players can start building a structure connected to their base and use the directional arrows on their keyboard to move away, then start crafting. It’s just not as simple as it should be and is constant throughout the MMO’s many mechanics.

Once travellers get the hang of the mechanics, gameplay boils down to crafting, building, and resource gathering. It’s a cycle of deciding what to build, determining what materials are needed, and mining those materials. Players will quickly learn that mining takes time, as the machines are slow and surface ores are limited and do not respawn. Scarcity has become a problem, and users are digging up too many limited resources, adding to operating issues and innate concerns with mining as a viable income.

Eventually, automation of gathering and developing factories can be done using a comprehensive schematic system. Factories help with organising ores and auto-building structures and systems. This is only one path or business a player may choose to venture into. Another may want to become a pilot and fly resources back and forth between worlds or become a master at designing space bases or freight ships. Fight for high-tier resources, for political domination, for an economic monopoly, or just for the fun of it. There is an extremely high ceiling for what players can become with the tools at hand.

For those who loved the experience of Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, or No Man’s Sky to an extent, the feeling of freedom and creativity in Dual Universe is fascinating.

I think we’ve got a problem

Novaquark has developed some incredibly ambitious technology to make Dual Universe. Its voxel-based construction all on one simultaneous server is an outstanding feat. The game can supposedly handle approximately 200 players in one area with superb server updating frequencies. There are detailed developer diary videos that give a sneak peek into what went into making this world.

These technological goals seem to be flat-out failures. The server technology suffers from individual player constructs and terraforming. The game begins to stutter uncontrollably when flying or walking through areas full of player creations. This is due to the bandwidth and networking bottlenecks with feeding large amounts of data about the game world and then GPUs struggling to render it fast enough.