We don't like effort

Well, you like tears, right? a better game on the newest **** will attract more players to farm tears from

Those reviews are very old, and wouldn't cover the state of the game even now.

http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dust-514-review/1900-6415604/

The gameplay's more tangible issues are too numerous to recount in full. They're wastelands of muddy industrial sameness, with no attention to scale or flow. Paths dead-end nonsensically. Ladders and hallways lead to empty rooms devoid of relation to objectives or tactics.

Weapon types are tremendously imbalanced. Audio effects sound cheap and have little relevance to the direction or proximity of their source. Dips in the frame rate result in distant enemies frequently looking like they're moving in stop-motion. The list goes on, but the problems run deeper.



Games like Halo and Call of Duty may be more limited in scope than Dust 514, but they can stave off any existential dread through the excitement and immediacy of their combat. Dust can make no such claims. Its poor gameplay is a taint that spreads upward from the roots, vitiating the lofty aspirations of its other features.

Skill and weapon unlocks, ordinarily the cherry on top of a satisfying gaming session, morph into taunting reminders of the grind to come. The experience points, money, and items that signify forward progress become signposts that warn you're going in circles: kill to get better weapons, to kill better, to get better weapons. All the work CCP puts into crafting a larger dystopian fiction bleeds into the real experience in this fashion: you feel like a cog in a formless machine, working--not playing--in service to obscure overlords and nebulous goals.



Dust's link to EVE was supposed to provide the context for these endless war games. But the bond between the two games remains ill-defined. Corporations, the life blood of EVE, barely receive an introduction in Dust. Ditto for the former game's vast libraries of lore.

Sitting in the cramped mercenary's quarters, just a few menu clicks away from jumping into battles all across the universe, it's impossible to get a sense of the vastness of space that makes the massively multiplayer online role-playing game at once so daunting and mysterious.

We know that data transmits across the void between EVE and Dust, because a name taken in one cannot be used in the other. But personality never makes the jump.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/30/dust-514-review

Before we even get into the larger universe around it, the most critical problem is that the actual shooting isnGÇÖt up to snuff. Similar games like Battlefield 3 succeed by making it fun to fight both on foot and in vehicles, but Dust struggles to even make firing a gun feel right, much less vehicle combat



Controls are frustratingly finicky across the board, shoddy collision detection leads to getting stuck on terrain you should be able to walk clear over, and a plethora of other odd idiosyncrasies constantly get between you and what you want to do.



THE VERDICT

Dust 514 truly aims high with a one-of-a-kind cross-platform endeavor. But such ambition is in vain if you don't have a solid foundation, and Dust's crumbles almost from the get-go.

Its wonky mechanics, weak graphics, and microtransaction fueled grind make it numbing to play long enough to explore its depth, and its persistent elements are completely lost on anyone who doesn't already have a foot down in the EVE universe. The ideas behind Dust 514 are clearly strong, but so too is the disappointment when they crumble under the weight of its free-to-play baggage.