Dune: Awakening review — Arrakis comes to life beautifully

Dune: Awakening made its debut on June 10th, with an early head start for folks who pre-purchased beginning on June 5th, and after about 70 hours on live servers, and close to 20 hours in the closed beta, I think I am finally at the point I feel comfortable giving the game a scored review. It’s been a wild ride since launch, with Funcom making massive changes after listening to player complaints very early on. We’ve seen major changes to the end game in the Deep Desert, with devs adjusting how much of it is PvP vs PvE, where at launch it was strictly PvP. It’s pretty rare for developers to listen to players to this extent, and to do it so early after launch, so there’s a lot to be said for that and the future of the game.

Dune: Awakening absolutely encompasses the look and feel of the recent Dune movies, you’ll even visit some of the locations you’ve seen there. Arrakis is huge, and feels oppressive as hell. Funcom did a fantastic job bringing both the novel and cinematic aspects of Dune to life. 

While Dune: Awakening is a very enjoyable experience, it really doesn’t act like your typical survival game. The few first hours of Dune: Awakening are loaded with fun and fear. This was the only time I truly felt it hit the survival mark. Before you are able to build your first little house, you’re constantly at risk of dying of thirst. Between hopping in and out of shadows to not get sunburnt, the lack of water, and those first few fearful crossings on foot hoping you don’t get eaten by Shai Halud, you do truly struggle for a little bit. Things really change once you get your blood purification station, literjon, and your first stillsuit, which if you don’t dilly dally, happens fairly quick. There is no hunger meter, so the only true survival factors are the sun and water, and to an extent much later in the game, radiation. 

If there’s one thing I would say Dune: Awakening excels in, it would be exploration. There are loads of enemy camps, points of interest, harvesting locations, crashed ships, Imperial Testing Stations (which are your dungeons) to locate and loot. I was super motivated and genuinely excited to keep exploring and powering through the first noob zone to unlock new crafting items, but it does become quite repetitive after a while, which I will elaborate on later. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but as someone who has put in 800+ hours in Funcom’s other title, Conan Exiles, I was hoping for more of an opportunity to build and decorate. Both games are kings of exploration, but I feel that Dune is lacking in the building department. Now that we are well into the end game, I have a few levels of reputation with the Atreides faction that unlocked some furniture, but even that isn't very exciting. I’d love to see the game enable mods, because that was what really made Conan Exiles fun in my opinion. 

Building structures and vehicles uses a system where you can place down a blueprint of what you want to build, then add the materials at a later date if you don’t have them right then. It makes building easier as you can visualize what you want and its placement without having to commit the resources and then find you don’t like it. Another great feature is being able to copy your entire base blueprint to a handheld device that will let you place it down anywhere you want. This is especially great for the Deep Desert, where you have to breakdown your base each week before the massive Coriolis storm comes in and resets everything on the map. The vehicles and ornithopters can also be saved in a device where you can pick them up once you land. I really enjoy this feature, and felt like it was an improvement on the already fantastic building system that is in place in Conan Exiles. 

Dune: Awakening launched with five classes; the Swordmaster, a fighter that focuses mainly on melee combat. The Mentat, meant to fight from a distance with gadgets, bombs, shields, and turrets. Bene Gesserit who controls the minds of others. The Trooper, which has both melee and ranged capabilities with a focus on destruction, and lastly the Planetologist which is an unlockable class in the starting zone that gives you a lot of exploration and resource boosts. Though you have to choose which class you start the game with, you will find trainers along the way that will allow you to unlock all of the classes, so you will be able to mix and match abilities to find a playstyle that fits you. 

I’ve been playing through the game with my husband, and we both chose the Mentat as our starting class, and it made things very easy from the get-go. The Mentat starting skill allows you to throw out a turret that pretty much one-shots any enemy you come across in the early stages of the game. Throughout the whole starting zone, first Imperial Testing Station, and first ship wreck, we blew through all of it with ease barely needing to pull our weapon out. Now that we are in the end game, we still have that turret on our bar at all times. I also really love the Bindu Sprint from the Bene Gesserit line, which lets you sprint at a ridiculous speed, and the Shigawire Claw from the Trooper line. Between the Shigawire, which shoots a wire out from your wrist to launch you, and the suspensor belts that you build on your armor stations, you should be able to get anywhere you need to go in early game, and both are loads of fun. I'd also recommend starting the Planetologist quest lines right from the start, and keeping up with them as you move to higher level areas. All of the classes has skills and abilities that felt fun, and being able to customize your skill bar lets you have full control of your playstyle.

Speaking of armor, we found it very important to run as many Testing Stations, big camps, and ships as we could to keep getting new blueprints. This also applies to the machinery you use in your bases, and your harvesting tools...especially your cutterray mining tool. Upgrade them as soon as you have the points to unlock them, as they produce FAR more product and raw material than the previous versions. You get loads of points to use to unlock your recipes so use them up and stay upgraded! 

Unfortunately, combat in Dune feels quite repetitive, and once you learn how to kite the melee NPC’s it becomes more tedious than exciting. Most mobs you pull will be chained to one another, so if you tag one, they will all rush you. Learning how to parry early on, and getting the timing right for it was essential. The combat isn’t really hard, it’s just nothing to write home about. The combat in the Testing Stations in Hagga Basin all kind of felt the same, while the scenery was cool, there really wasn’t any amazing mechanic or boss fight that we had to learn a strategy for. It’s just going in and killing everything. Once we got to the Deep Desert, the Testing Stations were the same, the only difference is you get locked into rooms and they throw wave after wave of mobs that have high amounts of health at you. Throwing a lot of mobs at you isn’t inventive or challenging, it just becomes so repetitive that you just check out very quickly. I’d love to see some overworld boss fights, raids, or boss fights in Testing Stations that require strategies and effort added at some point. 

Something else I’d like to touch on is quests, contracts, and the main story line with the Trials of Aql. All three of these left a lot to be desired. Finding NPCs who have quests for you, and even finding class trainers is not at all obvious. They are not marked on the map, there are no makers above their heads. We had to look up where to find our trainers because it got to the point where we wanted to see what else the classes had to offer and it was not obvious. We got really tired of clicking on every NPC who had an interact button, and it shouldn’t be that much of a hassle to pick up quests and train. We did eventually find that important NPC’s will usually have a small blue light above their head, which is absolutely does not stand out at a glance. I’d really recommend that devs add more obvious quest notifications on NPC’s in later patches.

I am a huge lore and story person, I am usually the one who annoys my friends when we play games with big stories because I always want to stop to soak it all in. This is especially true if devs have taken the time to hire voice actors, as it almost always makes me feel more immersed. My husband and I really didn’t seem to find the storylines very exciting. I didn’t care what anyone was saying after a while, and found myself clicking through most quests to accept them, which is very much not who I am as a gamer. This was especially true in the main story Trials of Aql. I think their intention was to make them compelling and thought provoking, but they were really just annoying distractions that didn’t teach me anything I couldn’t have just unlocked with an insight skill point. These Trials are designed to keep you moving in the right direction to the zones that will give you better materials and such, but they could have found a more exciting way to go about it. The only quests that I found to be interesting were the reputation quest line for the Atreides faction. It’s okay though, because as I mentioned before, what the game lacks in some areas, it more than makes up for in exploration. 

As a personal preference I like to keep my PvE and PvP games separate. I have never enjoyed PvP in an MMO setting. But give me a MOBA, or a game like Marvel Rivals, I am all over it. In fact, it’s mostly all I play these days. I know that in these first few weeks that Dune has been released, there was a lot of feedback on how unenjoyable the Deep Desert was, and a lot of changes have already been made. But for the reasons stated above, my husband and I decided to rent a private server for us and a handful of our fellow GT editors to play on without having to deal with other people. I am so thankful that the developers listened to players about the Deep Desert and made a large portion of it PvE for people like us. We have actually met a really cool group of people who were our neighbors a couple of weeks ago that invited us to their Discord and gave us access to their house for their large spice refinery. So we went from two people on spice runs, to five and sometimes eight people. Now, when we venture into the PvP areas, we feel a lot safer. Our server group has one guy that is a bully, so now we can enter PvP areas and fight back. I still don’t enjoy running into other players in Testing Stations or ships, but at least with a group it’s not as bad. 

Now, here's the downside of this adventure we have had in Dune: Awakening. While we still have a lot of quests left to do, and some more faction stuff to work on in the Hagga Basin, once you get to the Deep Desert there really isn’t much left to do for players like myself. I don’t care about the PvP stuff. As mentioned earlier, the Testing Stations are harder here, but there’s no real strategy or anything exciting to be done. We can keep getting blueprints for new or better gear, but for what? We can participate in the Landsraad, which is a faction based event that changes weekly and gives big rewards to the guilds who participate, but that gets repetitive as well. My husband has kept logging in daily to play with our neighbor friends, but honestly I am kind of just checked out and bored with the game. I enjoy base building and decorating, and would love to have more options or mods in that regard. I’d love to see raids, or overworld boss fights, better dungeons. Something to keep me interested. This is the main reason I just can’t get into MMO’s anymore, because I just don’t have the time nor interest to do dailies or repetitive things you’d find in a mobile game. Hopefully they will add more PvE things to Dune: Awakening, otherwise it may be a situation where every other year or so we pick up Dune and start over from scratch and run to the end game courtesy of some new expansion.

Ultimately, my impression of Dune: Awakening is that the team did a great job making the world of Arrakis come alive. The absolute terror I felt when trying to pass through large gaps for those first few big crossings is something I can’t say I have felt in a game. The sand moving around you, the creepy noises the worm makes, the radar flying off the charts in red…it gets your adrenaline pumping, wondering if you’ll make it or not. If you get eaten by Shai Halud, you lose everything on you, including your vehicle, so the risk is a huge gamble to take in the early game. You cannot ever recover any of the items either. I was actually so anxious about it when we first started playing, that I’d either leave my computer or put the game on mute and look away leaving my husband to drive us. That may sound like a bad thing, but the fact that the sandworm made me that scared means they absolutely nailed the point of surviving on Arrakis, and I wouldn’t last a day if it were real life. 

My final impression with this game has changed greatly since launch. My initial thoughts were very mixed, but I am quite content and happy with my time spent in Dune :Awakening at this point. Could the combat be more engaging? Yes, certainly. Would I love to be able to build bigger houses and decorate them with a huge catalogue of items? Absolutely. I’d love to see this game modded. None of these things make Dune: Awakening a bad game by any means, in fact it’s a very enjoyable and unique game. There is a TON of exploration to do, and while it does get repetitive, you really do feel like you’re desperately trying to survive on Arrakis. There is so much potential to expand on this game and I truly hope the devs shoot for the stars and make it better and better with each patch. At face value, even with no real enjoyable end game content for players like myself, the money is well spent on just the Hagga Basin content alone. You will easily put 50+ hours into the game, and all of it is a blast.