What excited me about Dunecrawl was the thought of piloting a huge crustacean behemoth across a shifting sands desert getting into adventures and feeling like it was part of a larger story. I remember seeing a video of the game and thinking to myself, ‘If they get this right, then it is going to be a wonderful surprise to the beginning of the year’. Further than that, if it ticked all the boxes then I was thinking already that it was going to be an experience that would end up at the top of the Steam Deck library, simply because of all the play time it would be getting.
In Dunecrawl’s favour, it’s all there from the beginning, the weird story of pottery versus crabs, the absolutely delightful graphics that remind me very strongly of Breath of the Wild, if it took place on a isometric viewpoint. The majesty of the huge crab that you pilot with help from a spiritual friend. The smaller minions that you can pilot to take you into battle. The islands in the desert that require an all out assault to carry out a rescue, or take down a villain group before they quite literally smash the vases and throw them at you.
There’s fun to be had in sands as you face off against other land walkers in the desert, and the crab you pilot turns shows its actually all at sea, as you man cannons and heal shattered limbs before you launch yourself onto the enemies’ body and take down the pottery of corruption. There’s further fun on foot as you take to the land and go exploring the islands, taking out rows of enemies with a plethora of weapons that include everything from timed charges to bows and arrows, to shot guns and exploding plant life. You do some light dungeon crawling with minimal quests and feel like you’re starting to understand the place a bit better. You’ll earn coins and buy costumes and jump atop your crab again and take off to the next adventure, commanding your co-pilot to steer the ship, or heal or even defend.
There’s a lot of cool ideas contained within the shell of the game. Setting a waypoint and being piloted while you keep an eye on the areas that you pass is interesting and it’s not unusual for you to get side-tracked as you discover a smaller island with chests and treasure and enemies to smack down. Very often you end up referring to the map and wondering to yourself, ‘Where was I going?’. Personally I don’t really think that is much of a bad thing. There’s always several icons begging to be visited and uncovered, hence the comparison to BOTW.
Unlike that legend among games, there’s a couple of things that grate a little bit within Dunecrawl that could do with some quality of life improvements. I find it strange that healing is something you need to equip like a weapon so you can use it. Especially in some of the more tense and hair raising situations when you are faced with a mob, and end up running away to save yourself before switching back to a weapon to continue the fight. You collect weapons as you play and these will end up in a weapons stash which requires you to move them to be used if your weapon slots are already full. I would have preferred to an option to auto-equip new weapons for immediate use. Weapons themselves aren’t something that you’ll grow particularly attached to and you’ll end up using a variety through a normal skirmish type job. It just makes for messy management when you want to be getting back to the fray.
I also wish the co-pilot grew in intelligence as you played and knew when to switch between jumping into battle to defend you crab or knowing when to heal or fire the cannons. It would be nice to have it as a level up option as you play, as again, you’ll be right in the middle of a bigger one on one behemoth battle and your helper is sitting there doing nothing to help you win the fight, especially if you’re in the middle of being blown sky high off of your beast. Often I let the crab take the damage and just went on foot, trying to avoid being blown away and hopeful nimble enough to scale up the enemy and smash the pottery robot. It’s more frustrating than anything else with no zoom out function to allow you to see the bigger picture. I’m not sure the run and gun was the intention of how Dunecrawl was meant to be played, but in solo rounds I often spent my time attacking and then hiding, whittling down the enemy as opposed to feeling like a progressive badass.
So I don’t know if Dunecrawl needs fewer ideas that need to be refined, or it needs to spend a bit of time giving the game an overall polish to make the bits that work really shine. After a while, the feeling of rinse and repeat came around the corner, and the original excitement started to wane. It wasn’t that I liked Dunecrawl less, it was just that other games seemed to offer a reason to come back more. It doesn’t break the bank in terms of how much it costs and what it will give you in return. It’s got all the ingredients to be something rather wonderful and fun, and I hope they find the time to make some improvements on the crab cake they’ve presented. It is a game I’ll go back to as I’m enamoured with the world that Alientrap have created. It’s still sitting there waiting to be played, and is unlikely to be deleted anytime soon. Unless of course it starts to smell a bit..
Developer – AlienTrap
This review is based on the retail version of the game provided to us by the designer and publisher. We were not paid monetary compensation for this review. We give a general overview of the gameplay and so not all of the mechanical aspects of the game may be mentioned. Videogames are strange because the act of playing them will often cement if you want to keep playing them further. So we normally give a video game the benefit of the doubt and keep playing until we get an idea of what the game offers. Some games will not require a huge written piece to describe what they do and how they made us feel about them. We understand that behind every game is someone who has dedicated time, effort and money and so we'll often tell you about things that didn't gel with us instead of trashing someone's hard work. We hope this write up gives you an idea of whether or not this game is something that you will consider playing or even add to your collection. Even if we don't like something, hopefully it helps you to decide if it is something that you should find out more about. We always suggest you check out a gameplay video to give you a better understanding of the game as it is played. If you would like to support more content on the blog then please consider backing us on Patreon. www.patreon.com/werenotwizards
