Oh man, this is such a good game. They have good in-universe explanations for why we're in an Arrakis without Paul Muad'Dib, the controls feel so good, and they recently made a TON of changes that actually fixed all the complaints from the initial launch. The endgame feels so much more fleshed out, combat feels good, gunplay feels snappy, building works great, the vehicles are AWESOME, I would play this just as a flight sim lol. The thopters can glide and have full rotation control when in glide mode. You CAN indeed barrel roll the giant carrier thopter, but I don't recommend it. PVE is a lot of fun and PVP is no longer required for endgame content. As far as I understand, you cannot ride the worms... At least not yet. But this game has a way of making you forget you wanted to do that by giving you so much other fun stuff to do. The POIs and dungeons are interesting, there's lots of good dialogue, and with the new performance updates the game runs REALLY REALLY well.
I think this game is worth the full price, and it's one of the only survival crafting open world games I can say I actually recommend playing on the official servers for. I think if you like Dune and the Dune universe, this is THE game for you. If you've played Conan or Ark: Survival Evolved and wanted those premises on a truly beautiful and functional sci-fi platform, this game is also for you. Nice little QOL is that when you die in most circumstances, you only drop like, materials. All your gear, you keep. You can also set vehicles as your respawn location, and bases as a whole. Bases also only need fuel to be up-kept, no taxes or logging in weekly. Once every 3 weeks someone does need to refuel the base, but you can hoard reserves to make that a five minute commitment. If you manage your power well and shut down things you're not using, you can hibernate a base for a very VERY long time, unlike ARK where you have to log in and feed the massive hordes of creatures nearly daily.
For the dune nerds: The melee combat is super viable (on par with if not surpassing gunplay for effectiveness!) and the slow blade does indeed penetrate the shield. They actually found a way to make that feel intuitive and satisfying and it's SO GOOD. The shields also 100% will draw the worms' ire and sic them on you with great haste. You can craft and place thumpers to distract them. There are suspensor belts like from the movies that can let you slowfall, jump extra high, and even just full on hover. The mentat skill tree lets you summon hunter-seekers as an ult, which is INCREDIBLE. The bene-jesserit skill tree does indeed let you use the voice on enemies. You can make them ignore you, pull aggro on individuals, and stun enemies in a small aoe. You can also do some pretty cool other stuff including metabolising poison. It isn't locked to one gender, but ingame you're kind of an "illegal" bene-jesserit so it gets handwaved. There are also "fixed" and "unfixed" krys knives and you do have to get them the same way you do in the book lol. Have fun with that. You can fly three different styles of ornithopter - the scout (my favorite, very nimble little dragonfly), the assault (a good medium thopter that can carry your friends and a lot of materials and has some better offensive air-to-ground utility), and the carrier, a massive eight-winged two-tailed thopter can carry vehicles (including crawlers that harvest spice like nobody's business) or just a giant frickin shipping container if you need to move your base, a ton of resources, and your friend's base all at the same time.
