Also On: PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox One
Publisher: Funcom
Developer: Funcom
Medium: Digital
Players: MMO
Online: Yes
ESRB: M
Dune: Awakening is a game that, when I initially saw it announced, had me go from “Ooh, a Dune game? This could be pretty cool!” to “Oh, no… it’s an always online MMO survival crafting game?”. I have to be honest and say that the initial advertisement I saw left me uncertain. As time went on, however, more details and footage were coming out and it seemed like maybe they could do this right. I still wasn’t sure, but based on early feedback I read from people who got to beta test, things were looking pretty good. I saw some early gameplay and went from uncertain to sold: this seemed promising. I got my review code in my inbox and hopped in, fully ready to go.
First impressions were good. I like the way the story is presented, and the visuals are gorgeous. The beginning introduces you to your character and tasks you with choosing from various backgrounds and “classes”. I, having seen a bit of the game before, decided that from the various choices of starting classes, the one with the grappling hook seemed like the smartest move. A little extra movement speed across flat ground to traverse areas patrolled by Shai-Hulud (The sand worms) if nothing else. My friend who played alongside me proved this to be true because he had taken a class without a movement skill at the beginning and found his demise to a Shai-Hulud’s maw.
Which gets me into the main topic, the part you’ll of course be interacting with in Dune: Awakening the most- the open world. Dune: Awakening’s open world is pretty populated with exploration potential, but it does throw some unique mechanics in your way to make it more complicated than most other survival games. First and foremost: the sun. The sun in Dune: Awakening is an active danger that threatens to kill you if you are exposed for too long. You are made to stick within the shadows as often as possible during the day, while the night time frees you up to make more distant and open movement. I think it’s really interesting that they’ve managed to flip the usual survival game expectation by instead making the night time feel more safe. That isn’t to say that exploring is truly any safer overall, though, as your secondary biggest danger will always be the Shai-Hulud lurking beneath. When you leave the safety of an outcropping of rocky terrain and into the open sands, you’re constantly making noise that WILL alert the worm eventually. Run too far, too often and you’ll be running for your life hoping to make it to the other side of the gap while a mouthful of teeth follow mere feet behind you. Get caught by the worm and you lose your entire backpack… permanently.
Death within Dune: Awakening is one of the… simultaneously most frustrating and sometimes too forgiving things in the game. If you dare to set foot on open sand and alert Shai-Hulud, you will be punished if you don’t escape by permanently losing everything you’re carrying. This sucks. The mechanic itself is kind of interesting, but… ugh, losing everything you’ve got with no option of recovery is a major bummer and I could easily see it causing people to rage quit. Luckily I had my handy grappling hook so I never really had to contend with the Shai-Hulud, but my friend was not so lucky: losing his bag multiple times in our earlier points while trying to just traverse. If you die while out and about, you can respawn at either your base, a respawn beacon you set, or at your vehicle. Dying by any means other than the worm only takes away a small part of your items in inventory and damages your gear. This end of the spectrum almost feels like I get off too light while the other end (worm death) feels really punishing.
Regarding vehicles in all of the above mentioned survival mechanics, I found it oddly… strange that once you get your first vehicle (I got mine maybe 3 hours of game time in), you immediately stop having to care about the sun. For some reason, being on a vehicle makes your character entirely immune to the effects of the sun and you’re now completely free to explore without a second thought on what time of day it is. I found this a little disappointing in my opinion, as the very unique mechanic of the sun could have spent a much longer time being something you had to fight with and being interesting. As it is, it mostly served as a cool early game function that I stopped thinking about entirely aside from the odd moment after a few hours. At this point, I only think about it if I’m deciding to climb really high, but even that at some point gets negated once you unlock the Ornithopter, so…
Dune: Awakening is a fun experience though, and I appreciate that it’s pretty well guided along while also maintaining the need to solve some of it yourself. I never really felt lost in my ~20 hours of playing, and always had something to work toward. The exploration is fun because the environments are pretty while maintaining unique landmasses. I enjoyed just riding around between areas to find what’s new in each, and climbing around to find the little hidden nooks and crannies. The map is HUGE, mostly thanks to the fact that they can get away with large swaths of empty desert that still manages to stay interesting thanks to the Shai-Hulud being ever present within them. It’s a lot of technically empty, but it doesn’t really feel like it in motion. I guess you can attribute that to good design. There’s always something new to find, even within one patch of rocks, since there’s pretty good overlap and verticality to all of it. Caves cross sideways under raider camps that patch up the area.
One thing that admittedly takes away from this beauty,in my opinion, is the simple existence of other players. The multiplayer I feel like is added at the cost of everything being brought down about one notch from where it could be otherwise. For example, the world: there are so many just… empty square boxes all over the map that players slapped down to get a simple base for themselves. In the busy server I was in, just about every rock outcropping had a player base slapped on it, sometimes being extravagant and elegant in a way that complimented the world, but usually just being a rectangle slammed into the middle of a walkway. Dune: Awakening does offer a way to avoid this by having a private server, but… those are rented and cost $11.49/month for the cheapest option. I really just think it’d be much better with a single player option or private world where you and friends can just connect into together, and it spawns your relative bases in. They have a system within the private servers that exist to still connect you with other people in the social hubs and PVE areas, so I’d love to see some addition for a more open existence of that. Funcom made such a beautiful world! I’d love to get to explore it without player builds (Without paying $11/month).
Also, the story is supposed to be about you personally. You’re the metaphorical “chosen one” in this alternate universe telling of Dune’s world. Yet… somehow, everywhere you go, there are fifteen other people who look just like you doing the same objectives you’re doing, hanging out in the secret caves meant for you, inhaling the incense and getting visions just like you. Their existence pulls you out of the “one” part of “chosen one”. It makes a lot of the world feel too overtaken by others equally powerful and effective on the environment as you. It also caused my experience with several of the lengthier underground areas full of enemies to be completely wrong and devoid of all life. In at least two separate circumstances, there was someone else exploring an extensive area who had already killed everything on my walk through for an objective and so I just sort of… walk through empty hallways collecting loot to get to my objective at the end. No tension, no anything, just empty space and free stuff. This also lead to, in one moment, me getting trapped inside an area because a person with the keycard unlocked a door that I didn’t realize was opened and it closed behind me. There was no escape and I had to force respawn myself and lose a portion of my items. Otherwise, player interaction could generate good moments like working together to take out a camp or just saying hi to a neighbor. But I mostly didn’t see people very often and more explored the ruins they left behind.
I feel like I’ve had a lot of complaints for Dune: Awakening above, so I want to try to instead talk for a bit about the good parts. It’s not all bad, and even the bad stuff above is mostly minor and just feels like me being an old man yelling at the clouds. What I did enjoy is the overall flow of gameplay. The melee combat felt a little weird at first, but I eventually got to a state where I could flow quickly between melee and ranged combat as enemies approached and it always felt great. Enemies come in a few forms, but most simply and importantly, they come either with a shield covering their body, which requires (or at least really encourages) you to use your melee weapon. Meanwhile there are usually some ranged enemies in a given fight that will try to take pot shots and throw grenades. The mix meant you need to stay on your toes and adapt on a moment to moment basis, which I really enjoyed. You can’t just do one thing and win every fight, you have to stay alert.
The crafting system is also nice and I enjoy the more simple resource management for the standard items. Some crafting will require water, which is a valuable resource, but most things only required some mixture of one of the four core materials available early on. There are some more rare items used in crafting, but they’re obtainable just by fighting enemies and looting, and I never experienced much that required me to go down a convoluted path to get specific materials. I think it’s setup really nicely and intuitively and I think Dune: Awakening handles the survival crafting mechanics extremely well.
Overall I do really enjoy Dune: Awakening, and while I still think the fact that it’s always online takes away from what it could be a bit, it doesn’t bring it down so far as to being unenjoyable. The framework is very positive and I had fun with my time in the game. I am intending to continue playing after writing this review, so I know it’s definitely good. I would recommend it to anyone who already knows and enjoys the world of Dune, but am not so sure people who aren’t otherwise would have the same ease of drop-in enjoyment I’ve gotten. It is one of the few games on the recent pattern of releasing at a lower price than average, so you can pick it up for only $50 if you’re wanting to try it! Dune fans, get in on it: you will enjoy it.
Note: Funcom provided us with a Dune: Awakening code for review purposes.
