Have you ever played a game’s tutorial and known at once that something was drastically wrong? Welcome to my latest nightmare, named Dune. How was I to guess that Frank Herbert’s classic novel would produce such a classic pile of dog crap? Hell, it’s so bad, it makes David Lynch’s ultra-tedious 1984 movie adaptation seem positively refreshing.

The tutorial in question kept using sentences like “Move along the wall” without explaining which wall it meant in a large collection of rooms, and it wouldn’t give any other instructions until I’d found just the wall it meant. (And no, it wasn’t the nearest wall.) Then my character managed to step near a guard who shot him to death, although I was the one who was supposed to be practicing my lethal skills. And guess what? The tutorial didn’t recognize that my character was dead: I had to abort it and rerun the thing.

Dune’s plot is supposed to be a retread of the science-fiction landmark, but I’m hard-pressed to find any element of its appeal here. Mainly you just steer Paul Atreides around generic locations on Arakkis, trying to solve a succession of adventure-game nonsense and being semi-impressed with the uniforms everyone is wearing.

All the faces are plastic, expressionless masks. Characters hover over the ground. Levitation? Nope, just bad coding. I was also unimpressed by the way Paul occasionally gets stuck when trying to run while standing directly next to an object. After all, how can you fight well if it looks like you can move in a given direction, only to run into an invisible wall that prevents movement?

And so it goes. There are plenty of other problems — some mission objectives aren’t listed, enemy AI is brain-dead, and so on — but why am I even doing this? I could be enjoying myself more if I’d been dropped into a pit filled with hungry sandworms. Needless to say, there’s no reason to buy this game.

— Barry Brenesal