Dune: Awakening Review

If there’s one thing beyond doubt after having played well over 100 hours with Dune: Awakening, it’s that Funcom has done its homework in crafting the most authentic take on the Dune-iverse imaginable. As a longtime fan of Frank Herbert’s iconic sci-fi setting, that’s an incredible thing to experience more often than not, and my time on Arrakis has been filled with moments of genuine shock. It’s very clever how the harsh environments and empty space are repeatedly used as progression checks, turning what seem like they should be weaknesses into strengths. Other times, that stubborn adherence to established lore results in annoying or just plain boring irritations, like how you’re all but forced to adopt a nomadic lifestyle in a genre where putting down roots and building up your base is one of the fundamentals. There have also been plenty of technical issues and bugs, an endgame that could use a bit of hydration, and combat that never stops being underwhelming, but on balance my friends and have had an absolutely awesome time nerding out.

If you’ve ever played a survival game (and have read a Dune book or seen the movies) before, you’ll know most of what you need to feel at home among the giant sand worms: you gather materials from the world, build your own ugly-as-heck home, and upgrade your equipment to gain access to more dangerous areas with rarer materials. Like plenty of survival games, including Funcom’s own Conan Exiles or last year’s Once Human, all of this is happening on a server full of similarly sunburnt players in a perpetually online world, where cooperation and limited instances of PvP are both a distinct possibility, and which account for most of its best moments.

The story is an interesting twist on the Dune world that takes place in an alternate reality where Paul Atreides was never born and House Atreides doesn’t collapse as a result. It’s a smart decision that allows for Awakening’s developers to play in the Dune-iverse without tying themselves to canon events or being obligated to kill off the various fan-favorite characters that the novels dispose of with reckless abandon. The plot is full of lore, familiar faces, and a few compelling twists and turns, but unfortunately each of those chapters is separated by about a dozen hours of gameplay and grinding that makes it pretty hard to keep track of or enjoy in any comprehensive way. Plus, Funcom makes the classic mistake of randomly throwing in a stealth level, and though it’s not quite as annoying as these one-offs tend to be, it’s definitely not playing to Awakening’s strengths. All in all though, I quite enjoyed the story that’s told, in large part because it makes such good use of the universe and worldbuilding.

Where this game really sets itself apart, though, is by just how much it adheres to its legendary setting, and that has a major impact on just about everything you do. For example, clever use is made of Arrakis’ harsh environment, which is weaponized against you quite literally every second you stay within its atmosphere. Standing directly in sunlight unprotected will bake you alive in a matter of seconds; sandstorms blow on a regular basis and will kill you if you aren’t able to get to shelter first; and most notably, there’s the issue of those pesky, enormous, man-eating worms which gobble you up if you dare tread upon their domain for too long. By leaning into the unforgiving world as much as it does, Awakening puts you in a constant battle against the planet itself. So instead of casually trotting around collecting resources at your leisure and settling your own little piece of the world, you’re frantically ducking behind rocks to avoid the sun’s harsh rays and drink what little water you have left, and playing a never-ending game of “the floor is lava” as you rush from one place to another with a shai-hulud hot on your heels.

All of these hazards give you obstacles that are satisfying to overcome. For example, early on you’re unable to leave the tutorial area thanks to a massive gap of empty space where sun exposure or, more likely, a massive worm would certainly kill you if you attempt to go on foot, so you have to craft your first vehicle in order to safely cross it. Later on, you start to encounter places that are too hot or irradiated to explore without proper equipment. There are plenty of examples just like this, where the unique nature of the setting is turned into an interesting mechanic and usually Awakening is a better, more interesting survival game for it.

But there are other times where this fanatical adherence to Dune conventions can be quite obnoxious, like how you’re encouraged (and in some cases required) to move your base of operations from place to place as you unlock access to higher-level regions. Pulling up stakes means you either have to abandon all you’ve built up to that point or tediously relocate as much of your equipment as you can, piece by piece.

Then there’s stuff like the fact that guns are often useless, since many enemies make use of the all-important Holtzman shields that completely protect from ranged attacks. This creates a weird situation where you’re juggling back and forth between guns and melee weapons depending on which enemy is currently running towards you, oftentimes having to choose between addressing the swordsman barreling down on you or the guy a few feet behind him with a chaingun, which can create a really oppressive rhythm to combat. While using guns is more effective at the start, once enemies start getting shields here’s little reason to ever use a gun. Melee is much better at killing enemies, since you can sprint through almost any bullets that bounce off your shield, then stun and stab enemies relentlessly until they die, but this becomes extremely monotonous, since every encounter plays out identically with almost no variety.

That’s just part of the reason that, like almost every single one of its peers, Dune: Awakening has pretty awful combat. I knew going into a survival MMO that would be the case, but it’s still a particularly bitter pill that never gets any easier to swallow. I spent half of my time playing with ranged weapons before switching to a vastly more effective melee build, but both are repetitive, sloppy, and downright janky. I honestly kinda respect how much Dune: Awakening sticks to its guns by making said guns ineffective to keep with Dune lore, even as it sometimes comes at the expense of me having a good time.

There are, at least, some neat little tricks like Bene Gesserit powers that let you command enemies to stop dead in their tracks for stretches of time, or an anti-gravity grenade that suspends everyone in the air, but very little of this stuff mixes things up enough to make up for the hours of blandness forced upon you. What’s more, there’s also some really irritating bugs, like how sometimes the parry button is unresponsive, or for some reason you simply won’t be able to swing your weapon at all until you unequip and re-equip it, which requires running away frantically to find a hiding spot where it’s safe to do so. Again, in the world of MMOs and survival games alike, I don’t expect anything as polished as Gears of War, but if you were hoping Dune would get this bit right I’m afraid that it definitely does not in its current state.

Thankfully, the combat miss is more than counterbalanced by the absolutely stellar survival mechanics, which are some of the most thoughtful and polished I’ve seen in a while. There’s a constant stream of new technologies to research, equipment to craft, and material to hunt for with almost no filler or repetitive grind along the way. Every time I collected the right materials to craft the latest shiny thing I want, I immediately had another enticing item to chase, and with unique schematics dropping left and right, I was always making interesting decisions on whether to spend my rarest materials on a cool item with a special effect versus taking the more conservative route and just crafting common items to save those resources for a rainy day (it’s gotta rain on Arrakis eventually…right?) There are some instances where the exact amount of materials needed to craft something, and the time it takes for those recipes to be cooked up, are a bit much, especially in the endgame where you can go through ornithopters quite quickly during PvP. But aside from these more extreme, late-game examples, the progression is incredibly well paced.

It’s especially impressive that Funcom accomplished this loop so well in a desert world where there are no other locations aside from hot sand, and almost no plants or wildlife available to harvest. A major hallmark of survival games is punching trees, and there are no trees on Arrakis – instead, you’re making tools to pull water from morning dew collecting in the world at night and by pulling it from the air, which is just really clever and a welcome change of pace that embraces the weird and barren setting, even if it is still essentially the same thing.

Though it took me over 80 hours to complete the campaign and master the main map of Hagga Basin, there’s still quite a bit to do once you reach the end of the grind and are inevitably pushed out to the Deep Desert to begin the endgame. This PvP-heavy zone is the only source of the materials necessary to reach the highest heights currently available in Dune: Awakening and has some really great ideas, like how the Coriolis Storm sweeps through each week and destroys everything in its path, leaving behind a new procedurally generated map to explore and fight other players to build settlements on. Unfortunately, those maps are absolutely massive and largely empty (and not in a good way, like the Hagga Basin), and what structures and shipwrecks there are to explore are mostly carbon copies of one another and almost instantly become a chore to explore.

But worse than that is the fact that the main event of the Deep Desert is the PvP experience, which is presently pretty awful – and not just because combat in general isn’t great in Awakening. The current meta involves everyone on the map flying around in ornithopters, carpet bombing one another into oblivion as they fight for a small amount of minerals needed for crafting. There’s very little in the way of gunplay, and hand-to-hand combat is fairly rare unless you get caught inside a shipwreck or cave, which isn’t all that likely when so much of the map is barren dunes. It’s a massively unrewarding experience that leaves those without guilds or powerful ships to live under the oppressive regime of their fellow players. If your ornithopter is destroyed in a dogfight, which is fairly likely, then you’ll need to haul your defeated butt back to Hagga Basin for another few hours of grinding to make a new ship, just for the chance to get your teeth kicked in and your mouth filled with sand all over again.

What’s hilarious is that even if you’re on the winning side of that brutal equation, you’re rewarded with basically nothing since players only drop the loot in their backpack and hang on to the much more valuable items they likely currently have equipped on their person. You’re at least able to grab some high-value materials, including the all-important spice, which helps you craft some of the most potent items on Arrakis, but those can also be scavenged from the world if you simply get lucky and swoop in undetected to grab what you need and leave before someone blasts you. It’s a meta that simply isn’t very fun for either side, and combined with the lack of rewarding things to do, I suspect this underdeveloped part of the Dune journey will be the focus of some serious revamping in the weeks and months to come.

Speaking of which, there’s still some technical work to be done as well. It’s certainly better than it was during the beta, but even as improved as it is, I’ve had disconnects, seen entire mountains disappear and reappear before my eyes, and even had a few hours where all sand worms just up and deleted themselves from existence, making everyone on the server swarm to the resources normally protected by their constant threat. It’s not been the smoothest launch by any stretch – but also far from the worst.