Dual Universe is a game that I had no knowledge of until my boss slid me a review key of it and asked me to try the game out. The trailer seemed to be very reminiscent of other space games like Eve Online and No Mans Sky in where the player has an abundance of freedom, but is capable of filling in various roles with the virtual society of the game. This game definitely appears to head in the direction of creating a virtual society, as the website stated that Dual Universe is a metaverse game. However, I am worried that this game has come to players far too soon, despite the fact that the game has been in development for about eight years.

In the game, you take on the role of a human who has been in hibernation and is asked to do whatever you want. The story of Dual Universe is rather simple in concept and not really mentioned much besides giving you a background reason as to why you are slapping down a home in the middle of a galaxy. Essentially, Earth was dying and you were placed on an ark in order to continue human civilization in an uninhabited, yet lush part of the galaxy. While this story does seem very similar to that of Mass Effect Andromeda, it seems duller than that because there is no personality to anything right off the bat. The story is essentially there to just connect the dots of how you got to where you are, so your brain can make that simple connection.

The analogy “less is more” rang through my head while I was initially playing Dual Universe, except it rang in reverse. There is a monstrous amount of things that one can do in Dual Universe, which is quite the achievement for the developers. However, everything seems so far away from possibility. When I first spawned before the game publicly launched, I teleported my character into a spirit in someone’s hanger that was situated over a body of water. The hanger absolutely blew me away with the designs the person had made. I suspected it might’ve been a testing ground for a developer to check the market features, but I wasn’t sure because I couldn’t find anyone, despite the fact that the game claimed that there were six other players there. The only thing that was certain was that my computer was having a difficult time processing everything it was trying to make me see.

Making my own home in Dual Universe was very easy. In the beginning of the game, I was asked to select a prefab home and vehicle in order to set up a base of operations and give me a simple way to move around the planet. The home has the basic necessities from shields for protection from intruders, a drill to get raw materials, a computer, and a teleportation device that allows the player to upload their consciousness to a second body of sorts (this is what I was trying to explain when I went to the random player’s hanger in the paragraph above). After setting up all of this, you are pretty much left to your own devices to do whatever you want. You can decide to open up a market, find someone to trade with, build things to increase production of various materials, create spaceships, and a couple of other things that focus on the building of a virtual society.

The one thing that definitely threw me off is how you pay for Dual Universe. It is not a one time purchase, but rather a membership that you have to buy in order to access it. I would be curious to see if you lose all of your stuff if you don’t renew your membership or if all of your stuff just becomes static. It would be interesting because I could easily see the metaverse society of Dual Universe partially collapse if a certain character and their buildings are wiped off the face of a planet or disabled because the player didn’t want to renew their subscription. However, with the reviews that have come in while I am writing my own, it does appear like a blossoming society within the game is still just a glimpse in the developers’ eyes. This is quite a pity since they have been working on the game for eight years, but the game could always pull off a No Mans Sky and come roaring into the mainstream of games in the future.

A PC subscription of Dual Universe was provided by Novaquark for this review.

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Dual Universe

$14.99

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• Massive Open World
• Seemingly Endless Possibilities

Cons

• Monthly Subscription Model
• Taxing on High-End Hardware
• Forgettable Story
• Time Vacuum