There is no greater feeling–of awe, despair, exhilaration–in Dune: Awakening than being eaten by Shai’Hulud. In the 60-plus hours I’ve spent with developer Funcom’s open-world survival MMORPG, I’ve been swallowed by the sandworms of Arrakis exactly twice. Both encounters were moments I’ll never forget.
Dune: Awakening is filled with these kinds of moments, ones where the desert world of Arrakis becomes the star and the player merely a small actor. Whether it’s crossing the open desert sands and narrowly escaping Shai’Hulud’s maw or piloting an Ornithopter for the first time, Funcom’s latest makes author Frank Herbert’s iconic book feel real in a way not even Denis Villeneuve’s critically acclaimed Dune films managed to accomplish. Dune: Awakening is nothing if not ambitious in that regard, adapting an infamously difficult-to-adapt masterwork of science-fiction with confidence. Though it eventually does become repetitive, its endgame lacks direction, and its strict adherence to the source material is sometimes an Achilles’ heel, Dune: Awakening nonetheless manages to carefully mix and match genres to create a Spice Melange cocktail that is hard to put down–at least for the first few dozen hours.
From Dune: Awakening’s very first moments, Funcom’s reverence for Herbert’s universe is clear. While clearly inspired by the look of Villeneuve’s films (certain designs, like the Ornithopters, Imperial Testing Stations, and the look of the Harkonnens are ripped straight from the movies), Funcom also puts its own spin on the Dune universe, effectively blending the two looks together to create something that feels both familiar and different, but unquestionably Dune.
Dune: Awakening takes place in an alternate timeline from Herbert’s story, one where protagonist Paul Atreides is never born and Arrakis has turned into a battlefield between House Atriedes and House Harkonnen, giving Funcom just enough creative breathing room to take creative liberties and deliver some surprises over the course of its main story.
All of this is on display in the game’s opening moments. The game’s character creator is presented as a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gom Jabbar interrogation: Funcom’s take on one of Dune’s most iconic scenes. It’s here where you’ll not only choose your look but your backstory and social status in the Dune universe. You’ll also choose a starting class (Mentat, Bene Gesserit, Swordmaster, or Trooper), though Funcom smartly doesn’t lock players into these roles.
Everyone can unlock access to each class tree by completing a series of quests from various trainers, though some trainers are easier to reach than others. At the end of the character creator, you are then given your mission: Find the Fremen, the oppressed indigenous population of Arrakis that has gone mysteriously missing.
Surviving Arrakis
One ship crash later, and you find yourself on the surface of the inhospitable desert world Arrakis with nothing but a scrap-metal knife and rags for clothes. The sun wants to kill you. The bandits want to kill you and take your water. Hostile patrol ships dot the skies with searchlights looking for you. And the worms want to swallow you whole for daring to walk across the open sands.
I will be the first to admit that I am not typically a survival-game fan, and in its opening hours, Dune: Awakening plays like a typical survival game, albeit an extremely polished one. You gather resources, craft items, and build shelter. There is, at least, some overarching direction, as the game directs you to craft certain items and gather required materials necessary for surviving life on Arrakis.
Rather than punching rocks, you’ll fashion a makeshift Cutterray that is used to gather resources, done by scanning an object and then tracing a path with a laser beam to dismantle it. Since gathering resources is a big part of Dune: Awakening, it’s no small feat that even one of the game’s most basic pieces of moment-to-moment gameplay managed to keep my attention dozens of hours later.
Funcom smartly revolves nearly all of Dune: Awakening’s survival mechanics around the need for water. You need to stay hydrated and stick to the shade, as staying in direct sunlight for too long will quickly cause sunstroke that, if left unchecked, will result first in dehydration and then in death. At first, you will likely be barely scraping by, harvesting dew from tiny plants and extracting (and, if truly desperate, drinking) the blood from enemies in order to survive. But it’s not too long before water becomes less about survival and more of a currency. Items start requiring water to be crafted, and soon, efficiently gathering water becomes a core gameplay loop.
To build better items, you need a bigger base, filled with more item-fabrication machines and more water, which in turn require more power. Since I’m not typically a survival-game enjoyer, it shouldn’t be too surprising that I’m also not typically a fan of base-building. It’s my least favorite aspect of games like Fallout 4 or Valheim–a chore I often feel like I have to do in order to get to the good stuff. Dune: Awakening, however, makes base-building extremely simple for those who want to do the bare minimum, though at some point solo players will need to invest the time and energy into making and powering bigger structures in order to make higher-end gear. Walls, roofs, and floors all connect together rather seamlessly, and there’s no need to run power cables to various machines. Fuel for your base is easy to come by and things, by and large, just work. Refineries and fabricators pull from storage containers inside a base, minimizing the need for constant inventory management, and shifting power from one structure to another is all fairly simple.
While I largely relied on a group of friends and guildmates when it came to building larger bases in the late game, the handful of smaller bases I built on my own came together quickly and painlessly, which is not something I can say of most survival games I’ve played. In a smart innovation, bases can also be saved as shareable blueprints that can then be easily re-constructed in a different location later with the press of a button (assuming you have the proper resources), saving you time down the line.
Bless The Coming And Going Of Him
It’s after these first few hours, once you’ve crafted your first water-collecting stillsuit and built a barebones base, that Dune: Awakening begins to come into its own. There comes a point around this time where you’ll inevitably need to cross a large body of sand. That is, of course, where Dune’s iconic sandworms live, and carelessly sprinting across the open desert is a surefire way to attract their attention. While normally death in Dune: Awakening is a relatively low-risk affair, only resulting in the loss of some held resources and currencies (both which can be reclaimed by returning to your site of death), as well as item durability, getting eaten by Shai’Hulud holds bigger repercussions. Dying to a worm means losing everything on your body at that point in time. All your armor, weapons, resources, money. All of it. And there’s no way to get it back. That gives some real stakes to crossing the desert: a feeling of danger that never truly goes away, even after you’ve crafted your first vehicle.
A feeling of progression and mastery over a harsh, untamed land is something that Dune: Awakening does especially well. While you start in nothing but rags, it’s not long before you’ll find or craft a suspensor belt, allowing you to more easily climb (or fall) from higher elevations thanks to anti-grav technology. A few hours later you’ll be able to craft your first sandbike. Suddenly, the world of Arrakis opens up, as you can now cross larger bodies of sand more quickly and explore new areas. Funcom pulls this magic trick again dozens of hours later once players have accumulated the resources to make their first flying Ornithopter. Once again, the game changes dramatically, and previously inaccessible or hard-to-reach areas are now just a short flight away, making for more efficient resource gathering and faster traversal across Dune: Awakening’s main Hagga Basin map.
But those same vehicles can also lure you into a false sense of security. Both of my sandworm deaths happened when I was using my bike. One time was simply because I was careless. Following some of my friends across the sands on their bikes, I saw that the worm was close by but decided to press my luck, thinking I could reach the nearby rocks in time. My sandbike couldn’t outrun an angry Shai’Hulud, and I lost everything, including my bike.
To say I was devastated and frustrated would be an understatement, and it’s easy to see how some players might simply walk away from Dune: Awakening forever after suffering such a fate. It is worth noting that Funcom is seemingly well aware of how soul-crushing getting eaten by a worm can be, especially when it means losing a vehicle. On my first sandworm death, I was presented with a Fremen vision, after which I was given the chance to recover my sandbike just this once. I happily accepted the offer, only to die by a sandworm again a few hours later. This time it was because I drove into a patch of quicksand. As I thrashed about trying to escape, the worm came and ended my suffering. Thankfully, I was able to save my sandbike before death by storing it in what I can only assume is some kind of pocket dimension using the game’s handy vehicle-backup tool, one of the extremely few instances in Dune: Awakening where gameplay convenience overrides established Dune lore.
Combined Arms
Unlocking the sandbike is where Dune: Awakening truly finds its rhythm, as the world, for the most part, becomes yours to explore. The first arc of the game’s main story fits nicely into this pattern, tasking you with exploring the world to discover Fremen shrines sprinkled across the game’s various regions, where you’ll learn more about Fremen culture and gain the ability to craft iconic desert-survival tools like thumpers.
Crafting higher-end recipes requires finding different materials found only in specific regions of the map, encouraging you to slowly progress through the world. Unlocking those crafting recipes, in turn, requires intel points, which are gained from leveling up and finding intel hidden inside enemy NPC encampments. As someone who likes to clear out a region of the map almost in its entirety before progressing to the next, I found I often had far more intel points than I knew what to do with, as I roamed from enemy camp to enemy camp, cutting my way through enemies as a melee-focused Swordmaster. Aside from gathering resources and base-building, this is the core loop of Dune: Awakening: Survey a region, clear out enemy camps, gain intel, learn crafting recipes, make better gear, and progress to a new area. Rinse and repeat.
It’s a loop that sustains itself for dozens of hours, even if combat, it should be noted, isn’t Dune: Awakening’s strongest feature. The Dune universe’s unique setting, one where soldiers still use knives and swords thousands of years into the future and wear shields that practically make them invulnerable to firearms, does make for some fun rock-paper-scissors-like encounters. Using lore-accurate slow-blade attacks (Dune: Awakening’s version of a heavy attack) to penetrate enemy shields is always satisfying thanks to the game borrowing some of the same visual and audio cues from Villenivue’s Dune films. There are also ranged weapons in the form of various dart-guns that come in pistol, assault rifle, sniper, shotgun, and minigun varieties. My favorite ranged weapon, the Drillshot, fires slow penetrating darts that are excellent for disabling shields, allowing me to then quickly close distance and engage in melee.
It’s all fairly basic in terms of its actual gameplay–there is a stamina bar, a parry button, and short-ranged dash–but it gets the job done. It’s the presence of shielded enemies who are nearly invincible unless dealt with in the proper way that manages to keep encounters from quickly becoming boring, even if you do end up fighting what feels like the same handful of enemy types, in extremely samey-looking cobbled-together structures, over and over.
It certainly feels like Funcom, in staying true to Herbert’s lore, ran into the issue of being unable to deliver greater variety when it came to Dune: Awakening’s enemies and locations. There are no “thinking machines” (aka robots) in the Dune universe. Nor are there aliens or outlandish monsters (aside from the sandworms). That means you are relegated to exclusively fighting similar-looking humans that come in just a few different forms–knife-wielding melee enemy, ranged assault rifle enemy, ranged sniper enemy, and shielded heavy enemies who use either a minigun or flamethrower. Some late-game enemies will use some of the same abilities players have access to, like anti-gravity fields or Bene Gesserit kung-fu, but these barely change the math of an encounter.
This turns out to be one of Dune: Awakening’s greatest weaknesses, and one that also translates to its dungeon-esque Imperial Testing Station dungeons, all of which feel nearly identical. While Arrakis is brilliantly brought to life, staying true to Herbert’s world means most of what you actually see and do in Dune: Awakening is exhausted within the first two-dozen hours, even if major milestones like gaining a new type of vehicle or a major new class skill do inject some new life into the equation.
Combat is where the game’s class system is felt the most. You can have three different active abilities equipped at a time (with the third unlocked over the course of the main quest) as well as three “techniques” that grant various benefits. There is no limit on the number of passive abilities you can learn, which make up the majority of skill nodes in each class tree. While I focused initially on Swordmaster, giving me access to special melee-parry abilities, increased melee damage, and more stamina, I eventually branched out into other class trees by completing various quests from class mentor characters.
Aside from its main quests, these trainer missions are actually where most of Dune: Awakening’s narrative takes place, with voice-acted NPCs and ongoing narratives that pull deep from Herbert’s lore. I wish Dune: Awakening had more of these types of quests, as most of the game’s other quests (or contracts, as they are called) are relegated to walls of text and accepted from mission boards found within the game’s various NPC outposts. It doesn’t help that these mission-board quests (and a decent number of the actual trainer quests) are often nothing more than MMO-filler–go here, kill 10 slavers; go to this spot, pick up this item. While Dune: Awakening’s main story missions do deviate from this formula (the Fremen vision quests focus more on platforming and environmental gameplay, while the main story’s second half takes a more cinematic approach with more novel objectives), it’s still disappointing that so much of the game’s questing feels like busy work.
Dune: Awakening’s class trainers are spread across the Hagga Basin and the game’s two social-hub cities. The game doesn’t skimp on rewarding you for your time, as you gain XP and level up for gathering resources, exploring new regions of the map, or defeating enemies, rewarding skill points in the process. As a result, early on, you will likely have more skill points than you can use simply because you don’t have a way to access the trainer you are looking for. This does hamstring the feeling of character progression in the early-to-mid game, and it would have made more sense to have the first class trainer for each class more easily accessible at the start of the game, as opposed to the Bene Gesserit trainer, for example, being on the extreme far side of the map.
Dune: Awakening does, at least, let you respec your skills with almost no penalty (there is just a 48-hour cooldown before it can be done again), allowing you to invest points for the time being and then experiment with different abilities as you gain access to new class trees over time. The Bene Gesserit tree in particular is among the game’s most flashy, allowing use of the franchise’s iconic “Voice” abilities to stun enemies or sprint with superhuman speed.
Spice For Spice’s Sake
It’s a shame then that those class abilities, ones that players have gotten accustomed to and experimented with for dozens of hours, become largely forgotten in Dune: Awakening’s heavily Ornithopter-based endgame. Once players can create an Ornithopter, they have access to a new map called the Deep Desert. Though the layout of the Deep Desert map changes weekly, it’s where the game’s best crafting recipes and most valuable resources, including the largest amounts of Dune’s oh-so-important Spice, can be found. You need a lot of Spice and other materials to make the game’s final tier of gear and base facilities. To call it a grind would be an understatement.
Until recently, almost all of the Deep Desert was a PvP-enabled zone where other players could battle over resources. That largely resulted in large guilds or groups of players using their Ornithopters to bully solo players from the air, with ground-based fights using the game’s melee combat or third-person shooting practically nonexistent. To its credit, Funcom has at least realized that having Dune: Awakening’s endgame be almost entirely controlled by roaming helicopter death squads isn’t a fun experience, especially since PvP in Dune: Awakening is an extremely rare occurrence up until that point and most players (myself included) don’t want to have to grind to rebuild their precious Ornithopter after it’s blown to pieces in battle. As of a recent patch, around half of the Deep Desert is now player vs. environment, allowing solo players or those who don’t want to engage in PvP a chance to gather some endgame resources, though the largest quantities of them are still found deeper in the PvP-enabled area of the zone.
While Funcom has addressed some of Dune: Awakening’s endgame issues, its largest problem still stands: There is simply not much point in grinding for dozens more hours to acquire thousands of Spice and endgame materials. There is no endgame raid or difficult PvE challenge that requires, or at least would be made easier by, having the best-of-the-best gear. In the Deep Desert, you are largely doing exactly what you’ve already been doing for hours in Hagga Basin: clearing out camps, mining resources, and diving into Imperial Testing Stations for rare recipes. Sure, gearing up in the highest-quality gear and weapons is fun, and becoming a multi-millionaire by running a sophisticated Spice-mining operation has its perks, but unless you are looking to get an advantage in PvP, there is no carrot on a stick for continuing to deal with Dune: Awakening’s repetitive, grindy, and pointless-feeling endgame.
I imagine most players will quit shortly after having completed Dune: Awakening’s main story and arriving at the Deep Desert. But that doesn’t mean all the hours prior to reaching the endgame aren’t worth experiencing or aren’t enjoyable. Funcom has turned Herbert’s legendary sci-fi planet of Arrakis into a captivating video game setting. Part story-driven RPG, MMO, survival base-builder, sci-fi helicopter simulator, and third-person shooter, Dune: Awakening is a multi-headed hydra of experiences that, somehow, coalesces into a largely satisfying whole. While it suffers from a serious lack of variety when it comes to enemies and activities, and its endgame as of writing is a largely pointless endeavor with no real goal to strive for, Dune: Awakening nonetheless succeeds at bringing the universe of Dune to life in a way never before seen. When the Spice is flowing, it’s easy to lose oneself to the rhythms of Dune: Awakening’s desert for hours at a time. Just take care not to attract Shai-Hulud.
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