[Wretchedness]

From what I played at Eurogamer I have to say that Dust 514 is not a very exciting game. We all got drunk in our hotel room one night and spent about 5 hours playing a game that involved us all standing on one side of the room trying to throw a Jagermeister lid into a cup on the other side of the room. This was infinitely more exciting and probably more original than Dust. I have said before that games don't need to be original to be fun, this seemed to be neither.

From what I played it just seemed like a very uninspired shooter with no personality of it's own. It all seemed like very by the numbers stuff. I played a team Death match on a very metal grey map. Or was it military grey? I’m not sure, but it was dull.

It all seemed to be pretty by the numbers stuff and I wasn't keen to jump straight back on after the match had finished. I wanted to go and try out games I hadn't played a million times before, or at least felt like I'd played before.

I know I'm sounding very negative at the moment as I am just judging the game on what I have managed to play so far and despite my negativity I have to say that this game does have some promise. Those of you familiar with Eve Online may even be counting down the days until release.

You see, Dust 514 takes place in the same universe as Eve Online and here lies some originality and possible reasons to look forward to the retail release. Essentially these two games will now form part of one larger game. The Eve Online guys will be piloting ships above planets whilst Dust players will be fighting it out on the planets surface. So what was a boring team death match now takes the added significance of affecting players from Eve, meaning you have something to fight for. Eve players can even launch attacks from above onto the death match players.

Being set in a whole universe also means there are plenty of planets to fight on. There have even been promises of thousands of maps for players to fight it out on. This should hopefully mean my earlier complaints of boring, bland fighting arenas are soon put out of my mind.

After early trepidation I am actually starting to look forward to playing the full game. There's plenty of promise mainly due to the cross game connectivity and I for one am looking forward to seeing how they implement it.