Dune Awakening is an ambitious survival crafting sandbox set on one of the most famously oppressive places in science fiction, the planet Arrakis, also known as Dune from Frank Herbert’s series of the same name that started in 1965 and spans 6 huge books in the original Dune series. Developer Funcom has games like Conan Exiles under its belt, but is Dune Awakening unique enough to stand out in a genre that is growing more saturated by the day? Short answer: This one is one of the best games in the genre and a real Game of the Year contender for me. This one is a doozy.
Dune Awakening
Developer: Funcom
Price: $49.99
Platform: PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for review
Dune Awakening has the advantage of being set in a universe that I already have a heavy investment in. Dune is one of my favorite franchises of all time. I remember being a heavy reader in elementary school, and going into middle school I found the first Dune book in the library and checked it out. I was blown away by its technical detail and depth. It was the first book that ever presented itself to me like I was an adult. Full of encyclopedias, maps, and terms I had to look up, to then reread scenarios with that gained knowledge. I was hooked, and I think it is a big reason I have a love for heavy world building in general.
That depth and detail are not ignored in Dune Awakening, diving into the Dune world beyond the usual real-time strategy or 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) faire for the first time was met with a lavishly detailed world dripping with love for the franchise and tons of things to chew on for fans both old and new alike. It takes a ton of notes from the latest series of adaptations by Dennis Villeneuve visually, but it extends beyond the scope of that into territory that is new and exciting to finally see and experience ourselves. I started this out with some heavy Dune exposition because it truly is central to this whole experience. I recall a comment from someone on the dev team about how they couldn’t bend the Dune Universe to fit the gameplay; they had to work around the universe. I can’t stress this enough, Funcom knocked it out of the park following that philosophy.
The giant, desert-planet is, unsurprisingly, hot. What is surprising is that worrying about the heat is one of the smaller problems you are faced with throughout this journey. You have 4 main meters to maintain: Health, which works as you would expect with a small threshold from regaining health if you are too low. Stamina, which you use for a multitude of things, like Power, which fuels your various pieces of equipment. And finally, your thirst level. You are encouraged to run from shade to shade during the day, as your sunstroke gauge slowly builds up if you are exposed to direct sunlight, and will increase the amount of water you consume. It’s a non-issue at night, which means you get into a nice bit of a reverse survival-game loop where you dedicate a lot of traveling and gathering time to be at night early on when the environment feels a lot fiercer.
Speaking of traveling, this brings up one of the most constant threats Arrakis presents, but also one of the most important to its ecosystem, the Sandworm. These massive creatures regularly reach sizes up to a mile and a half long, with some getting even bigger. Borderline invulnerable, fiercely territorial, and able to swallow entire complex machines in one gulp, invoking the wraith of Shai’ Hulud is a quick way to write yourself a ticket to the other side. In-game, this translates to your actions on the open sand generating vibrations that sandworms can pick up on from long, long distances away. Some things, like the Holtzman shield, which is the primary defense in this universe, drive them into a violent frenzy that few walk away from. Spend enough time running across the open desert, mining shipwrecks, or even fighting in it, and the Sandworm will be sure to rear its ugly head and do its best to eat you alive. This is not ideal, because death by sandworm is the one way to instantly lose all of your belongings in Dune Awakening outside of very rare scenarios that are voted on serverwide.
Thankfully, careful planning and being cautious will keep you safe from becoming lunch to the planet’s apex predator, make sure you are taking a good route from island to island, don’t do anything too crazy, and in the case of a spice bloom (more on spice later) or a crashed shipwreck, get out of there before you get too greedy. Spend enough time on Arrakis, and you might even find ways to summon a worm where you need them. You are going to have to learn about it if you want to get your hands on the thing that runs the universe, which you can only get on Arrakis, the Spice Melange. There is something else it runs, and that is the end game for Dune Awakening.
I hesitate to just call the gameplay a third-person shooter, even if that makes up a lot of it. Dune Awakening presents a seriously interesting combat sandbox that blends class abilities, ranged combat, melee, and resource management. In another example of Dune universe detail, the Holtzman Shield deflects any high velocity attacks with ease, but it is the reason melee weapons have seen a resurgence in the universe. “The slow blade penetrates the shield” is the saying in the universe, but it plays into combat in a big way. Melee users can beat people with shields on easily while taking fire from their allies, while ranged fighters excel at fighting other ranged targets by capitalizing on unshielded shots, and all of this plays in the realm of class abilities as well. With 4 combat classes and 1 more passive one to choose from, players can mix and match nodes of the different skill trees to create the ultimate expression of their chosen gameplay.
I play as a combination of the long ranged Mentat class and the gun toting Trooper class for a focus on ranged combat, but I’ve dropped plenty of points into passive nodes in the other classes as well. The Bene Gesserit can use the power of “The Voice” to command both NPCs and players alike to do their bidding, and the Swordmaster brings the close-range combat to a focus, giving them several options to expand melee combat. Finally, The Planetologist is something everyone can utilize, giving boosts to a variety of stats, including bonuses to gathering resources.
It is fun, it is frantic, and it has some amazing movement potential for a game played in the third-person. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the combat in this game against both players and NPCs, even if it started a little rough by giving you a pretty terrible gun to start with. I was happy to see my worries were quickly quelled as the combat sandbox just continued to expand further and further.
Any good survival session needs a good base to go along with it, and I am more than happy to say that the building system in Dune Awakening is excellent. You will always see survival cubes out and about for maximum efficiency from some players, but if you want to make a giant sweeping base of operations, you have the tools available to you to do it. I’ve always enjoyed this aspect and take pride in making detailed, functional builds in this game in particular. Maybe it’s the Dune aesthetic giving unconscious points, but this is one of the best base-building systems I’ve seen in the genre. There are a bunch of visual styles to choose from and a big spread of things to decorate with as well. I stare at my friends’ houses who got the Ultimate Edition of the game with envy, that Caladan set has some seriously gorgeous stuff in it. Thankfully, not all of the additional styles are locked behind a version of the game and can be acquired with in-game currency easily.
So much of this game feels like it hits that same high note for me. The combat is fun and varied with a ton of options to play with. The movement is great, flying around while negating gravity with a grapple hook brought me enough joy that my guild makes jokes about how many suspensor belts (the degradable equipment that negates gravity in various ways) I must go through. Gathering resources is more than just hitting an axe with a tree; you have to trace out patterns on minerals, brave the open sand with a tool that compacts things around it to a gatherable state for special kinds of sand, and when you start to get vehicles? The entire landscape continues to change throughout the surprisingly large and varied story mode, and the progression just feels so clean as you overcome hurdles you once had, and ramp up production to new and more exotic materials.
The vehicles are a ton of fun and super unique. They all present a big opportunity to expand the scope of the gameplay with each one. The speedy Sand Bike lets you cross the first big expanse that stands between you and the rest of the game from the starting area. The Buggy redefines gathering resources with its cutterray mounted to the top of it, giving massive amounts more than hand mining with a personal cutterray. The iconic Orthinopter (the dragonfly looking airship) comes in a few flavors right now, the first one, the Scout, is a massive accomplishment that feels worth every house of work that went into making it. Finally freed from the sand, you can fly over things, transport materials, and even load it full of rockets if you want. The next step up is the Assault Orthinopter, sacrificing speed for size. Bigger storage spaces, more option spots, more firepower. It’s probably the only one that doesn’t feel quite as much of a jump, but being able to transport more materials will save you massive amounts of time. Finally, the Carrier Orthinopter and the Sandcrawler vehicles are made for the endgame of Dune Awakening, the Deep Desert, but we will save those for that section.
I’ve gone on a lot about the gameplay, the progression, and just how satisfying the general loop is, but I would be doing a disservice to the team at Funcom if I skipped over just how fantastic the experience they have created here is when it comes to the visuals and soundscape. Arrakis is beautifully recreated, as hauntingly dangerous as it is jaw-dropping to look at. Even playing the game mostly on medium settings, the game constantly silenced me as I looked out at the massive vistas on the horizon or wandered through abandoned testing stations. Medium was no slouch, it was genuinely impressive looking, and the jump too high wasn’t big enough to warrant the dip in frame rate it gave me. Even considering that, it’s amazing how well it runs. The quiet ambient music kicks in at the best times. Bombastic moments of the story are paired with impressive, equally bombastic music, while still feeling at home in the shared Dune universe.
I am a sucker for an in-universe radio and the one in Dune Awakening is a blast to listen to. Epic stories of the Atreides heroics are given life in radio dramas on their channel, along with some unexpected at first, but seriously appreciated chiptunes. Recounted tales of the Harkonnen slave pit fights are pretty gruesome, but they clearly understood the assignment when it comes to the Harkonnens in general. There is even a station with tunes from some of the previous Dune games, which was a really cool find. Combining all of this with the two social hubs of Arakeen and Harko Village, things come together to give us the most lovingly recreated recreation of Frank Herbert’s universe we have seen to date.
The story was a really nice surprise. It went much further than I thought it was going to culminate in a super satisfying point that left me excited for its continuation down the road. It is set in an alternate version of the Dune universe where the main character we know, Paul Atreides, was never born, and that massively changed how things played out when it came to the Harkonnans sneak attack on the Atreides, newly in control of Arrakis. Because of this, the Emperor of the known universe declared an Assassin’s War on the planet of Arrakis to determine who would maintain control of the planet.
You play as a good ole’ create-a-character that is sent to the planet to find what happened to the native people of Arrakis, the Fremen. In this timeline, the Emperor’s elite soldiers, the Sadukar, slaughtered their people, and they are widely believed to be completely extinct at this point. Things, of course, go wrong quickly, as they do, and you are stranded in the desert with little to show for it but your clothes and a mysterious warrior guiding your way. I was originally lukewarm on the story, but after the initial structure ends, and those last few of them really ramp up in the stakes and set pieces, it kept going much to my surprise. The final arc of the story available upon the launch of the game is a feast for those who know more about Dune lore than just the adapted material, and it had me on the edge of my seat. It was unexpected, and it absolutely worked for me.
There are many optional quests to undertake as you make your way through the story, and they have a good variety of objectives to undertake. The class quests, in particular, have interesting stories and multiple stages of quests to go through, but while some of the quests start with less fanfare, they turn out to be really interesting as well. Nothing quite hits the heights of the final story arc, but it provided plenty of excuses to venture out into Arrakis and do things while also lining your pockets with money.
The Deep Desert is one of the biggest maps I’ve ever traversed in a video game, stated to be over 500 square kilometers. It is vast, and there is a whole lot of empty sand to traverse, and the entire game has taught you the danger of open sand. To make matters more stress-inducing, this is the one place in the game where that player-vs-player switch is just flipped on at a certain point and not relegated to small shipwrecks in the normal Hagga Basin map. Not enough? What if the entire desert (and your buildings) were wiped out once a week by a massive, violent storm that gives you a brand new map every week? Originally, about 90% of the Deep Desert was PVP, with only the small, more developed area in the south being safe from the threat of other players. There was a lot of discourse about it, and shortly after release, the devs changed it to be closer to 50%. There is a lot to say about this, but for the record, I think it was a great change, and it requires more space than this to explain why.
Diving into the Deep Desert you are looking for materials that make the strongest equipment, blueprints from player-vs-environment testing stations (yes, someone can stroll right in and try to stop your progress in the PVP sections of the desert) and most importantly, the building block of every single piece of the endgame, Spice Melange. Spice is the most important thing in the universe of Dune, fueling interstellar trade as the Spacing Guild has humans mutated from constant Spice exposure, looking into the future to allow ships moving at warp speed to not crash into things. Not only that, it extends life, grants prescience in some cases without the whole mutated-tank-human things, and a litany of other things that make it so highly desired. Arrakis is the only place in the universe where it is made, as a byproduct of the Sandworm life cycle, so it’s the main reason people are fighting wars over control of the planet.
Massive explosions of purple and black erupt through the Deep Desert periodically, calling attention from everyone around who can see it. Sure, you can do the things you’ve done throughout Hagga Basin when you see that and collect it with a compactor, but this is the endgame, and we have the two vehicles I haven’t elaborated on that are introduced here to change the way the game is played. The fear of Sandworms, which you might have gotten over at some point in your adventure, is reignited by the endgame as you return to the ground to get as much Spice Melange as you can. To do that, you are going to need the Carrier Orthinoptor so you can pick up the Sandcrawler, transport it to spice blooms, and get out with as much as you can.
Those two things aren’t enough on their own, however, and we are getting to a little bit more controversial stuff here. You are going to need to team up with people to do the endgame of Dune Awakening, unless you heavily invest in the Landsraad system. The Landsraad System is a genuinely super cool endgame political game where you earn favors with the various houses in the universe, earn rewards, and at the end, the winning faction between Atreides and Harkonnen gets to enact server-wide orders that can have a huge impact. Large-scale spice operations borderline require four players at a minimum, and it’s a serious risk for all of those vehicles you worked so hard for; you are looking more towards eight if you want to have a safe and successful operation.
The large Spice Blooms are only in the PVP areas and are heavily contested. You need someone driving the Sandcrawler, someone hovering in the Carrier right above them, ready to scoop them up at a moment’s notice, and multiple people in the air with rockets on their Orthinopter to deter enemies and fight them if need be. Rounding that out, you have scouts looking for the next spice bloom to visit, as well as possible enemies on their way to your operation. Finally, someone needs to be paying attention to Sandworm activity, and be ready to place down “Thumpers” to divert any worms away from the operation.
It is a seriously big operation where a ton of things can go wrong, but it is insanely satisfying to actually organize, pull off, and bring those spoils home to your base. It’s been quite some time since I’ve done “guild activity” in a game and met a bunch of strangers to attempt to cooperate and play a game together, and I was a bit worried about this aspect myself at the start. I want to give a heartfelt thank you to the group I found before release, Obsidian Circle. I just wanted a place that wouldn’t mind me streaming parts of it, but instead, I’ve found a group of people who became quick friends. We are regularly in the top 3 of our server guild-wise, have operations in the Deep Desert almost daily, and I talk with them nearly every day at this point. I don’t think they knew I was a little nervous about the social aspect of this, but I can’t thank them enough for alleviating that instantly. Let’s get that #1 in Landsraad, baby, Obsidian Circle forever.
The Final Word
Dune Awakening has grabbed me more than any multiplayer experience in recent memory, comparable only to when Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers came out that I can recall. I’ve made myself one with the sand, I’ve made friends, I’ve made enemies and I’ve enjoyed every harsh survival loss along the way despite my initial angry reaction. Dune Awakening is the most meticulously and lovingly crafted recreation of Frank Herbert’s iconic world to date, and it manages to be a genre defining gameplay experience as well, with one of the coolest endgames I’ve seen in the genre. It has some bugs and some rough edges owing to its dedication to the franchise, but this is one special game that everyone should play.
MonsterVine Rating: 5 out of 5 – Excellent