There’s a game for the original DS called Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. In it, you play as a slime and have to load up your cool tower with all sorts of powerful ammunition to beat other towers. It’s one of those games that stands out in my memory as not only being a lot of fun, but also a concept I don’t feel like has been revisited since. DuneCrawl has a couple of mechanics that feel in the same spirit, and while the whole package is a bit uneven, that did put a smile on my face.
DuneCrawl is an open-world adventure game where you get to sit on top of a big old crab and fight other big crabs using cannons, yourself, and anything else you find. That’s only part of it though; it’s really more of a game where you explore dungeon-like areas to rescue people, find treasures, and progress the story. I wish the game was more weighted towards the cool crab fights, but alas, here we are.
Combat on the crab is loading up the cannons, firing, and using a shield to bounce things back. You can load yourself or another player in the cannon for cool boarding shenanigans though, and that’s wonderfully silly in a Sea of Thieves kind of way.
Non-crab combat is fairly standard hack and slash stuff. You get a bunch of weapons you can cycle through for different effects, which weirdly includes health potions, and have to try and hit stuff before stuff hits you. It’s fine, really, and some of the weapons are pretty cool, but it’s not a standout example of this genre.
The world is nice though. I enjoyed exploring things both on and off-crab, and there’s a solid sense of humour running through a lot of the quests that’ll help keep you entertained. The idea of this world that has issues with pottery and worships crabs is just kind of fun, and it helps make it feel genuinely unique very early on. I just wish the gameplay felt a little bit more special as well. It all just feels okay for the most part, and I want more than that from my games.
DuneCrawl is at its best with friends, which is really the saving grace here. As is so often the case, running around all of this stuff with a friend or two really elevates everything and ends up being a genuinely entertaining time. After all, where else can you load a friend into a cannon and then fire them off into the distance just for fun? That’s the kind of experience that we’re all after, and sure, it can be used to actually play the game as intended, but it’s nice to mess around with too.
