There are plenty of games that invite you to explore a mysterious world, battle strange creatures and collect enough loot to become an unstoppable adventurer. Far fewer ask you to do all that from the back of a gigantic mechanical crab, armed with cannons, surrounded by friends and desperately trying to stop your enormous crustacean companion from being torn apart by enemy fire. DuneCrawl, developed and published by Alientrap, takes that gloriously ridiculous idea and builds an entire open-world action-adventure around it. The result is a game with a distinctive personality, a wonderfully unusual setting and the sort of chaotic cooperative potential that could turn an ordinary evening of gaming into a collection of stories you will still be laughing about afterwards.
The premise is wonderfully straightforward. You venture across sandy seas aboard a mighty Crab Crawler, exploring scattered oasis islands and battling the jar-headed Vassals who threaten the Polloi pilgrims. There are dungeons to investigate, hostile wildlife to overcome, enemy fortifications to challenge and plenty of equipment to collect along the way. Yet the giant crab is more than a novelty designed to make the screenshots look unusual. It is the centrepiece of the adventure, a mobile fortress that serves as transport, a weapon platform and a shared responsibility for anyone travelling with you.
That last point is important because DuneCrawl has clearly been designed with cooperative play in mind. Supporting up to four players through local or online co-op, it gives friends an opportunity to work together in a world where everyone can contribute to the adventure. Solo players are not forgotten, either, with a ghostly companion offering assistance when there is nobody else available to join the expedition. It is an appealing foundation for a game that wants to combine exploration, combat and a healthy dose of absurdity without taking itself too seriously.
Your Very Own Walking Warship
The Crab Crawler is the star of the show, and quite rightly so. Travelling across the desert on the back of a gigantic mechanical crustacean is a wonderfully memorable alternative to the usual horses, cars and conventional fantasy mounts. The vast sandy landscape becomes a navigable playground, with islands scattered across the horizon and the promise of fresh discoveries encouraging you to keep moving. There is a pleasing sense of adventure in heading towards an unfamiliar stretch of desert, never quite knowing whether you will find valuable loot, a dangerous enemy or something that changes the direction of your journey.
The real fun begins when the crawler encounters opposition. These machines are not simply oversized vehicles that automatically deal damage while you concentrate on the scenery. You and your crew must operate the different systems, taking the helm, manning cannons, loading ammunition and repairing damaged legs when the fighting becomes particularly fierce. Each responsibility matters, and the pressure rises when several things start going wrong at once. A successful battle depends on more than pointing your weapons at the nearest target and hoping for the best.
There is something inherently entertaining about the prospect of coordinating a crew aboard a giant crab while enemy crawlers are firing back. One player might concentrate on steering into a better position while another prepares the cannons, leaving someone else responsible for repairs or boarding actions. When everything works, the result should feel like a proper team effort, with each player contributing to a shared victory. When it does not, the inevitable confusion is part of the appeal, especially among friends who can laugh about a disastrous encounter rather than blame one another for it.
Boarding actions add another entertaining twist. Instead of simply exchanging cannon fire until one machine falls apart, players can launch themselves through the air and attempt to board enemy vessels. This changes the rhythm of combat, taking the action from long-range exchanges into direct confrontation. It is an imaginative addition that helps distinguish DuneCrawl from more conventional open-world adventures, giving its battles a sense of theatrical spectacle that suits the game’s eccentric identity.
Of course, this approach also places considerable pressure on the game’s balance and controls. Managing a mobile fortress while dealing with incoming attacks could become frustrating if the different responsibilities feel awkward or if players struggle to understand what needs doing. Cooperative games live or die by how naturally their systems encourage teamwork, and DuneCrawl has an especially demanding balancing act because it asks players to work together both as adventurers and as the crew of a living, moving battlefield.
Exploring the Sandy Seas
Away from large-scale battles, DuneCrawl offers an open world built around islands, quests, secret dungeons and hidden rewards. The desert setting provides a distinctive backdrop for exploration, with oasis islands offering a welcome change from the seemingly endless stretches of sand. Each destination gives you a reason to leave the safety of your crawler and investigate what lies beyond the shoreline. The promise of useful equipment and unexpected discoveries gives exploration a practical purpose, rather than making it feel like travelling simply to admire the scenery.
The structure also encourages a satisfying cycle of adventure. You head out into the world, encounter enemies, complete objectives and collect resources or equipment that help you become stronger. New discoveries can lead to further upgrades, which in turn make more challenging encounters worth attempting. This familiar progression loop works particularly well when the rewards have a visible impact on how you approach the next stage of your journey.
Dungeons provide an opportunity to break away from the open expanses and focus on more contained challenges. Their inclusion adds variety to an adventure that might otherwise risk becoming a sequence of island visits and vehicle battles. Exploring these locations can offer a different kind of tension, with the promise of valuable loot encouraging you to push further into unfamiliar territory. The strongest version of this formula is one where each discovery feels worthwhile, giving players a genuine reason to investigate rather than simply follow the next marker.
The setting’s unusual enemy designs help the world feel different from more familiar fantasy landscapes. The Vassals, with their distinctive jar-headed appearance, are an especially memorable opposition for the Polloi pilgrims, while the local wildlife provides threats that are not necessarily interested in the larger conflict. There is a pleasing sense of personality in a world where giant crabs, strange insects and ceramic invaders all belong to the same eccentric adventure. It gives DuneCrawl a visual identity that should help it stand out in a crowded market.
When the Fighting Leaves the Crawler
Despite the spectacle of its enormous mechanical crab, DuneCrawl recognises that sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to get off the vehicle and fight on foot. The game offers a selection of hand weapons and items for dealing with the Vassal invaders directly, providing a more immediate form of action than operating the crawler’s cannons. This shift in scale is important because it prevents the central gimmick from dominating every encounter. You can enjoy the spectacle of a huge vehicle battle before stepping into a more personal skirmish on an island.
The arsenal sounds suitably eccentric, with weapons such as the Buzzooka and Acid Harpoon giving the combat its own flavour. Rather than relying entirely on conventional swords and familiar ranged weapons, the game blends traditional action-adventure combat with equipment that reflects the strange world around you. Environmental items such as Bomb Flowers, Beehives and Spider Eggs offer further opportunities to turn the local wildlife and landscape to your advantage. That kind of improvisation can make encounters more entertaining, particularly when players discover an unexpected way to deal with a troublesome group of enemies.
The appeal of these systems depends on how well the weapons feel in practice and whether different encounters encourage experimentation. A wide selection of equipment is only valuable when players have reasons to use it, and the best action adventures make combat feel responsive rather than repetitive. DuneCrawl has the ingredients for enjoyable, chaotic skirmishes, but the long-term success of its fighting will rest on the variety of enemy behaviour, the impact of its weapons and the challenge presented by its encounters. The concept is certainly promising, even if the novelty of unusual equipment needs satisfying combat mechanics behind it.
Riding Bugs and Building Your Own Style
The giant Crab Crawler is not the only unusual way to get around. Players can also ride smaller desert creatures, including multi-saddle beetles, nimble Nymphs and armoured Scorpions, with Ball Bugs adding another peculiar option to the mix. This variety is welcome, as it gives exploration a little more personality than simply travelling everywhere aboard the same enormous machine. Different creatures also offer opportunities to change the pace of movement and approach the world from a different perspective.
Character progression is tied to collecting Masks, Tunics and Talismans, which unlock powerful abilities and give players reasons to keep exploring. These items provide a sense of development beyond the straightforward accumulation of loot, allowing your adventurer to become more capable as the journey progresses. The appeal lies in finding equipment that complements your preferred approach, whether you favour direct combat, a particular weapon or a more supportive role within a cooperative group. A good progression system should make each new discovery feel like an opportunity rather than another item to add to an already crowded inventory.
Customisation extends to the crawler itself, with upgrades that include spike-armoured legs and guided torpedoes. These practical improvements help turn your mobile fortress into a more capable fighting machine, giving you reasons to invest in its future as the challenges grow tougher. Yet the game also leaves room for purely cosmetic choices, including paint jobs and hats. That small detail says a lot about the spirit of DuneCrawl: surviving the wasteland and defeating enemy forces is important, but there is no reason your enormous mechanical crab cannot look good while doing it.
A Cooperative Adventure With Personality
The strongest selling point is how the different systems fit together. Exploration provides the destinations, combat supplies the excitement, upgrades give players a reason to keep progressing, and the Crab Crawler brings everything together as a shared home and weapon platform. The ability to play with up to three friends should make these activities considerably more entertaining, particularly when everyone has a meaningful task during the larger battles. It is easy to imagine a well-coordinated crew turning a difficult encounter into a satisfying victory, or a badly organised one discovering that operating a gigantic crab is considerably harder than it looks.
Solo play presents a different challenge. Without other players to divide responsibilities, the experience relies on the assistance of the ghostly companion to make the adventure manageable. That support is important, because a game built around cooperation needs to remain enjoyable when approached alone. Solo players may miss the unpredictable conversations and shared chaos of multiplayer, but the ability to venture into the desert without arranging a group makes the world more accessible.
The main concern is whether the adventure can sustain its initial excitement over the long term. The giant crab is an excellent hook, but a memorable concept cannot carry an entire game by itself. Island activities need enough variety, combat needs to remain engaging, and upgrades must continue to offer meaningful rewards if players are to stay invested beyond the opening hours. Cooperative play can make familiar tasks more enjoyable, but it works best when the underlying adventure provides enough fresh challenges to keep everyone interested.
There is also a practical difference between playing with friends who communicate and playing with a group who simply want to cause as much chaos as possible. Fortunately, DuneCrawl seems perfectly suited to both approaches, with its unusual vehicle battles offering plenty of scope for coordinated tactics as well as entertaining mishaps. The prospect of launching yourself onto an enemy crawler while your friends attempt to keep your own machine intact is exactly the kind of situation that can make cooperative games memorable. It gives the adventure a playful character without removing the sense that you are working towards a larger goal.
The Final Verdict
DuneCrawl is a wonderfully distinctive action-adventure that takes a simple but inspired idea and uses it to give its world a personality of its own. Travelling across sandy seas aboard a giant crab is immediately memorable, but the real appeal lies in how that central concept supports exploration, vehicle combat, character progression and cooperative teamwork. From repairing damaged legs under fire to discovering hidden dungeons and upgrading your arsenal, there is a satisfying range of activities that bring the adventure together.
Its biggest strength is the promise of shared experiences. With up to four players, the crawler becomes more than a means of transport: it is a mobile fortress that asks everyone to contribute, creating opportunities for both tactical teamwork and gloriously messy improvisation. On-foot combat, bug riding and customisation options help ensure that the game has more to offer than its headline gimmick, while the unusual desert setting gives the whole experience a welcome sense of identity.
There remains a question about how consistently its exploration and combat can deliver fresh surprises throughout a lengthy adventure. Repetition can be a problem for any open-world game, particularly when its central systems are so distinctive that players may initially be willing to overlook their limitations. Nevertheless, the combination of eccentric world-building, cooperative vehicle warfare and satisfying progression gives DuneCrawl a strong foundation and plenty of potential to become a favourite for groups looking for something a little different.
For players who enjoy open-world adventures with friends, DuneCrawl offers an enticing proposition. It is imaginative, playful and packed with ideas that feel refreshingly unlike the usual fantasy or science-fiction fare. Sometimes, all a game needs is a brilliant central concept and the confidence to build an adventure around it. A gigantic crab carrying a crew of desert explorers into battle is certainly a good place to start.
