My first attempt to go to space in the Dual Universe was unsuccessful. He purchased a space bike, the least expensive and most spaceflightable vehicle in the space sims offered by NovaQuark, and intended to make a test flight from the planet Arios to its nearby satellite. However, through a combination of ignorance and mismanagement, he was unable to escape the planet's gravitational pull and crashed 60 kilometers from the nearest transport.

In a dual universe, distances are measured on a one-to-one scale, and without the resources to repair my bicycle, I was forced to trek two hours to civilization. Having fought the game's arcane system at every turn, I decided to stop playing it altogether.

After a little sulking, I sat back and got to it. While not exactly thrilling, the long journey home was more interesting than I had anticipated. The dual-universe planets and major satellites are not environmentally uniform, and as I traveled, I passed windswept deserts, lush forests, and open grassy plains. We also saw many structures built by players, from prefabricated houses to elaborate industrial parks. At one point, after a 15-minute trip along the bottom of a lake, we came across several player facilities built beneath the waves.

It gave me a sense of what was happening elsewhere in the world, and by the time I finally returned to civilization, I was motivated to keep going. This is what playing dual universes is all about. It's an intentionally ambiguous, regularly frustrating, and definitely unfinished experience. But beneath the intricacies of the many systems, there are hidden moments of vision.

Roughly speaking, Dual Universe is a hybrid of EVE Online, No Man's Sky, and Factorio, with a little Minecraft thrown in. It aims to be a fully simulated, player-driven sandbox where players will have the tools to build their own structures, design their own ships, and create interstellar corporations that form part of a dynamic economy.

Players literally land in this universe as a lone pioneer, given a chunk of territory to claim as their own at the game's starting point, the moon of Haven, and descend in a suborbital ship to a plot of their choosing. They then set up their starting settlement (I chose a flash futurist villa with a miniature runway), deploy their starting vehicle, the speeder, and learn how the game's voxel-based creative tools work.

From here, you are theoretically free to do whatever you want and start building your own legend within the Helios system. In practice, however, you will struggle to figure out what to do. The learning curve in the dual universes is more like a launch trajectory, with a myriad of interlocking systems to learn at the start of the game. Building, mining, crafting, establishing industrial pipelines, two different types of flight mechanics, and a labyrinthine talent system that varies greatly in what different professions can and cannot do. Even ostensibly simple things like buying and selling items in the marketplace have tutorials that must be followed.

It is an intimidating prospect, and the great irony of it is that at this early stage all you have to do is very simple: break rocks. The planet is littered with randomly generated surface ores that can be mined with an all-purpose multi-tool. These ores are the basis for developing more complex materials, but they can also be sold in large quantities for a small but easily obtainable income. Once you have a few hundred thousand dollars, you can purchase a stand-alone mining unit that passively mines the ore.

The problem with doing this is that there is no eBay in the dual universe. To sell something in the game, you have to take it to market like a medieval peasant. Moreover, depending on where you first set up your flag, your starting point could be 20, 50, or even 100 kilometers away from the nearest market. As a result, the opening hours of the dual universe are quite a miserable ordeal. You drive to the market, unload a large bag of rocks, drive home, mine more rocks, and unload them again .......

There are several ways to escape this systemic chain of events. You can buy a new territory control unit and take a shuttle to the planet Arios. But while claiming the first piece of land on the new planet is free, the land is taxed at 500,000 units (or 2-4 hours of ore mining on the surface) per week. I don't understand why they do this. If it's to prevent people from claiming ownership of land they don't use, Novaquark should just make their ownership null and void for not logging in for a week, for example. Arbitrarily taxing players of fictitious lands in a fictitious centralized organization is indeed puzzling.

Another alternative would be to use the ore for craft projects and use the results yourself or sell them on the market. There are two problems here, however. First, making anything even remotely useful in the Dual Universe requires multiple steps, and unlike Factorio, where you start from the beginning and methodically work through each step, here you start with what you want to make and work backwards through the making process before you get there. Also, everything that is made by hand has a timer. If we wanted to make an assembler and automate the crafting process, we would need about an hour's worth of crafting from raw materials to the final product.

Another problem is that once something is made, there is no guarantee that it will sell. As mentioned earlier, the dual-universe economy is driven by players. However, because it is a new game with a fairly small player base, the economy has not yet had a chance to become established, making it difficult to know what to make and where to sell it.

In short, every system is wildly different and difficult to tackle. At the same time, there is a nagging sense that the dual universes are not really complete, despite the fact that they have entered v1.0. The play area is currently limited to a single star system, and the "Universe" section of the map menu is grayed out. The planets you explore are topographically beautiful but largely inert, with no weather systems and no animals beyond a few pixel-shaded birds and butterflies. The handful of rudimentary delivery missions the game offers feel like hasty attempts to compensate for the absence of a coordinated experience.

Basically, starting something in a dual universe is hard work and only intermittently enjoyable. That is, anything except the boat itself. Honestly, the biggest mistake Dual Universe makes is not getting you up in the air as quickly as possible, guiding you to the nearest ship vendor as soon as possible, because flying in this game is great. [The dual-universe flight model leans toward simulation without crashing into the control tower of realism. While ship maneuvering is relatively simple, maneuvering is influenced by factors such as engine power, fuel type, momentum, gravity, and even the mass of the inventory currently being carried. As a result, even a simple hop from home to the local market requires careful monitoring of altitude to avoid crashing into terrain, careful adjustment of speed as one approaches the landing bay, and attention to other player ships that may be parked or landing/taking off on their own This requires careful and thoughtful flying.

Interplanetary flight is even better. Taking off from the surface of a planet is tricky, as the planet's gravity and rapidly thinning air make it difficult to maintain altitude. If successful, however, the speed will begin to increase rapidly from a few hundred kilometers per hour to tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. Spaceflight itself is a management of acceleration and deceleration, and at high speeds it can take several minutes to decelerate, and if you start the process too late, you will hit the planet like a dart.

Except for the LOD pop-in at the planet, all of this is completely seamless. In fact, it is one of the best examples of seamless space-to-planet flight I have ever seen in gaming. For example, if you are piloting a hybrid aircraft (capable of both space and planetary flight), there is a wonderful moment when the blue-painted atmospheric engines cut out and the orange space thrusters slowly kick in, pushing you into the void.

Dual universes have their problems. It tries to meld different systems together, but it doesn't do it as well as games that borrow those ideas. The difficulty curve is so steep that many players will slip off the difficulty curve before the game is at its best. Virtually everything you do requires you to take 17 steps, one of which will always fail and you will have to start all over again. But hidden underneath is a pleasantly concrete space sim with powerful creation tools and a genuinely great flying experience. It's certainly not for everyone, but it's by no means inferior, and for some brains, it will be a blissful experience to master the intricacies of the controls.