I have an ambivalent relationship with this game, it's very much like my toxic exes - beautiful but fundamentally flawed.

Arrakis is beautiful and unforgiving as it should be. Great adaptation of the source material on a visual level. I love the desert with its deadly worms and sandstorms. I like the ornithopters and Spice collection. I enjoy meeting other players, seeing their bases grow from small bricks into impressive fortresses (or slightly bigger bricks with shielded hangar). The world looks and feels like Arrakis, the land of sand.

However, this "game" has no respect for player's time whatsoever. It's keen to waste it with never-ending grind for resources without any meaningful automation. There's tedious inventory management, brain-dead fetch quests, crappy UI and more. On top of that the game is full of bugs - obviously undercooked features, immersion breakers, graphics and gameplay glitches, and many unbeliveable bugs that throw away hours of player progress.

But wait, there's more! You're required to periodically log-in and perform boring maintenance tasks involving farming unless you want to lose your base. I'd like to play this game when I want, not when the game wants. You can't leave the game at will either, because you can't pause and at many points, AFKing means losing progress upto losing your vehicle and full inventory - hours of work.

Yes, this "game" is actually work for no-lifers. You're not allowed to have life, The Spice Must Flow! And also Aluminum, Plant Fiber, and million different resources you need to farm - Arrakis Farming Simulator 2025. And don't forget to demolish and rebuild your Deep Desert base every Monday.

I had fun for about 20 of ~120 hours, the rest was work.

I've played this game 100 hours in two weeks (full-time and some more) and it took me 48 hours just to get basic ornithopter. It handles well for a MMO, but meh compared to simulators with actual physics. Gotta love the Assault thopter booster which does dramatic speedy effect without changing speed whatsoever in glide mode. But maybe you can gain height faster? Who knows, everything in this game works in mysterious, obtuse, cryptic and generally unexpected ways.

The PvP is an underbaked afterthought, I've spent tens of hours in Deep Desert and didn't get a single player kill or death. Co-op opportunities are limited, there isn't really anything meaningful to do with friends expect grind resources towards common goals but it's more efficient to solo most of the time.

In the age of creative and streamlined crafting games with automation such as Factorio, Satisfactory, DSP, etc. this game brings uninspired unautomatable grind like it's 2000s MMO. Everything this game does on a gamplay level is done better elsewhere in over-saturated survival-craft genre with few exceptions mentioned in the beginning.

After an unimaginable amount of grind, you can in theory coordinate Spice harvesting using Sandcrawlers (harvesters) and Carrier Ornithopters (carryall) and Assault / Scout thopters as escort with your guild, but seriously, can you assemble a group of 4+ friends who will be willing to work for 100+ hours just to have few hours of fun before realizing there's not really anything but grind for grind sake as the PvP sucks camel balls? I've heard legends some guild actually did it... but never seen a single Sandcrawler myself and I certainly don't plan to build one because I'm healing from this abusive relationship.

I've had 2 friends playing with me, it was nice seeing them around and occasionally grouping up but most of the time we were solo farming as the developers insist with their design choices. They lost their ornithopter to a worm due to bugs 3 times, I was shocked they didn't rage quit.

Seeing how chaotic, inconsistent and undercooked the game is all around, it comes to no surprise that skill tree is a total mess with useless and outright broken skills doing something else than described in their cryptic descriptions.

Performance is terrible, I bought new PC masterrace 5070 Ti / 9800X3D system to ease my suffering on Arrakis but even with that beast, there are frame drops sometimes.

The game has a launcher so you have to click twice to actually start it before it takes eons to actually load.

I can't in in good conscience recommend this game to anyone but extreme masochist no-lifers who desire to be punished by being deprived of both their time and their dignity.

You have been warned.