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Dune Awakening is a game about supply logistics. In fact, after Factorio, it's the second-most addictive game about supply logistics that I've played. And it's not the spice talking. For those already invested in Frank Herbert's beloved Nebula-winning sci-fi universe, this game will line up a delightful few weeks, and if Funcom plays its cards right, years even.
I, on the other hand, have no stakes in the Dune universe. I haven't read the books, nor watched any of the movies. Dune Awakening was my first footstep into the adverse sands of Arrakis, and it has a chokehold on me like no other survival game in recent years.
I had no nostalgia or fanservice to tip the scales with, it's all pure gameplay. Turns out, Funcom does know how to make quite gripping pure gameplay: I have put over 50 hours into the game in four days, which should be a statement on how well the game swallows you up.
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Dune Awakening: The weight of a kindly survival game is a fearful thing
Before Dune Awakening, I have been on-and-off in dozens of survival-craft-sandbox-exploration grinding wheels: Enshrouded of late, some ARK before, Once Human last year, Terraria for over a decade, the annual Subnautica run, you name it. These tend to veer into two different directions - some will let you off the leash to enjoy a creative-mode experience, others will vehemently tap into the whole "survival" thing.
Dune Awakening has no pretenses about leaning towards the latter, somewhat similar to Valheim. It's the most theme-appropriate thing for a desert planet to be completely unkind toward you.
The rough friction of Dune Awakening is not the difficulty of acquiring resources. The mining grind is actually quite forgiving and doesn't get overwhelming until much further into the game. Instead of toiling away with a pickaxe, you do it like in Warframe's Plains of Eidolon or Orb Vallis — point a laser, trace a line for all of two seconds, and the ores pop out.
The unforgiving element is the fragility of what you have. In many ways, Dune Awakening preaches the lesson of letting go. You are forced into a nomadic abandonment of your first base because, you are told, the princess is in another castle.
What do you need to do to get around? Trudge through open sands. It's coarse, it's rough, it gets everywhere, and the vibrations from your footfall will inevitably attract a sandworm.
Sandworms are the darndest thing of all, and they can end your whole run just like that. And getting your starter three-wheeler is no cheat-code to elude it, the godly apex predator can catch up to you all the same if you're inexpedient.
Imagine you abandoned your last base, all your belongings saddled to the mint-fresh copper sandbike you need to cross the desert into the next area. Out pops the sandworm, and gives chase. The camera zooms out, as you just know in your heart, it's all joever.
Sandworm deaths are the most brutal; they munch up everything in your inventory and spit you out naked. There is no retrieval, and if you were between jobs, no fallback plan. Worst of all, if you are a solo player like me, there's no easy catch-up strategy.
This precisely is what makes Dune Awakening greater than the sum of its parts. Its often refractory adherence to its own gameplay equations works out in the long run — the true survival experience insists upon itself.
Bankrupted, sunburnt, and suckling on dew to survive and picking up the improvised shiv of destitution to start over, I made peace with the true endgame in Dune Awakening: supply logistics and vehicles.
In this game, you need to collect a lot of resources that spawn in different places throughout the incredibly large open world. What do you need to get around? Move from point A to B without getting eaten by Sandworms. The lone, level sands stretch far away, and so must you. For which you need vehicles.
From sandbikes for criss-crossing between regions, doing errands, and scouting out points of interest, to the game-changing buggies for gathering and moving resources en masse, to ultimately that 'thopters that unlock a whole new dimension of gameplay — vehicles are climactic hooks in your journey of pyon-to-messiah progression.
A lot of mini-systems and mechanics intersect this journey. Not all of them are equally polished or palatable, but on the whole, Dune Awakening is an engaging experience because these mini-systems intersect in the right places.
The audio-visuals
Too often, I'll see Unreal Engine 5 games inherit a sort of AAA graphics homogeneity. Distinct art directions are sacrificed on the altar of something a boardroom of investors would think looks like a great tech-demo for cutting-edge high-fidelity graphics.
Dune Awakening does not get sucked into this AAA meat-grinder; it's a phenomenal game visually. With a pretentious assumption of "it's a desert, how good can it look?" I was humbled by Mad Max in 2015. Ten years later, I'm humbled yet again.
From the blood-red twilight sands of the starting area to the misty layers and massive depths of the Rift, Dune Awakening has some jaw-dropping moments. As harsh and unfavourable Arrakis is, Dune Awakening presents a beautiful, vivid visualization with just about enough variety.
It has clear impressions of Denis Villeneuve's work with the visuals in 2021's Dune movie (and even a little bit of Blade Runner 2049), and manages to be just as picturesque when it needs to.
The sand itself is a very well-simulated part of the puzzle. It has perceivable physics, gradually building up over surfaces where it makes sense, reaching into your base through holes in the ceiling after a sandstorm, and other neat details you may not notice right away.
Where Dune Awakening knocks it out of the park even louder is the audio territory.
The weapon foley, the howling winds on the barren salt flats, the industrial rings of metal in the Ironworks, and the oppressive gloom of the brutalist Imperial Stations, the humming heart of civilization in Arrakeen — everything ties together perfectly for an absolute audio-visual treat.
Where it truly shines through is the sublime threat of the Shai-hulud, sending out guttural quakes through the sands. The sound design is accentuated by the well-rationed, sparse, and highly impactful musical score by Knut Avenstroup Haugen. This is the most functional video game music I have heard in a while, too. Brief stingers building up to the danger music act as accurate and helpful cues when trying to dart past sandworm-prone wastes.
The base-building
Naturally, in a game of this particular blend of genres, the base-building is an important component. Dune Awakening is an MMO of all things, so that puts self-expression on an even more important pedestal. Thankfully, this is another area Funcom tackles very well. Arguably, it's the studio's best work so far, exceeding even the already robust base-building in Conan Exiles.
There are various flavors of prefabs and building materials through various tech eras and faction variances. All of them stand out from each other, yet blend perfectly into the art design of Dune. As I marvelled at the size and architectural complexity of some player-made bases, nothing has ever looked out of place in fifty hours.
I am personally the building guy — the guy who hangs back home to build and decorate our humble abode as my friends scatter for their hunter-gatherer adventures. I give Dune Awakening the official builder seal of approval.
It's not the most comprehensive system I have ever seen, but it has everything from rounded half-walls and extendable balconies (though a pain to do right) to trench-like widescreen windows that can run through the entire floor. Also, pillars, so you can just make your base a concrete treehouse with ladders.
The combat
During the beta, the most divisive element of Dune Awakening's gameplay was the combat. Melee is clunky, and gunplay is just functional enough to be serviceable. This sense of jank is mostly owing to animation, and perhaps some of it is due to the challenges of doing combat right in a persistently online environment.
Namely, there's a lot of animation-syncing and teleporting, enemies not having perceptible feedback to being shot (even taking a lethal shotgun blast to the face like the hardest of troopers), and general jank.
However, if you forgive the animation jank of movement, climbing, and some little eye-sore moments, the broader combat design is well put-together (though PvP is another story). The game's opening area misrepresents how tactical it can get in due course.
The enemy AI gets surprisingly crafty after you move on from the first area — chucking grenades to snuff out your cover-shooter plans, using abilities tactically, and coordinating between different combat roles to make things challenging. When it doesn't bug out, that is. I have also run into occasions of the enemy AI being completely dead and numb to my presence, not even detecting me till I walk into whispering range and open fire.
The junk and bugs greatly downplay what is otherwise some rather neat systems. Take for example, Shields. It would have been easy to merely beef enemies up with a straightforward second health bar. Instead, shields in Dunes absorb all projectiles with Power, a tertiary resource that has its own pace and progression.
Shields also get temporarily disabled when the shield-wearer opens fire, but otherwise, the only effective ways to take them down are a well-timed charged melee attack or specific anti-shield weapons. The even neater part: these rulesets apply symmetrically both to you and to the enemy.
Dune Awakening has a decent enough combat system when you think about the sheer number of tools at your disposal. As you zone in on the lategame, the shielded enemy ganks become a bit too distastefully swarmy, as though every grunt has started to wake up to how useful Shields are.
This problem is solved by the great many disengagement, mobility, and control tools you are given through the class system. The fact that there are no class restrictions, and you can choose to be a jack-of-all-trades, of bails out the game more than you'd think.
The intrigue (of MMO shenanigans) and the problem (of PvP drudgery)
It would never be Dune without some political intrigue. There are a lot of social and organizational elements to form something greater than yourself: from a duo party buddying it up to a large-scale guild dictating the flavor of the week with the Landsraad voting system.
The social features in Dune Awakening are sufficient to qualify as an "MMO": there is proximity chat, multiple social hubs, plenty of legroom for roleplay elements and faction tension. The only problem, as I see it now, is the PvP.
You see, the PvE combat in this game is sort of enjoyable because it gives you multiple tools for dealing with the tanky enemies instead of having to outgun them with brute force. With PvP, there is no such tool, and no readily apparent solution for a fair duel.
I can get healing kits and ammunition for days, and so can my opponent. Plus, the way the dodge system lets you off the hook so easily, means there is little to no window to meaningfully punish a player for making a wrong move. It's all too easy to just disengage, reset, and re-engage.
In effect, one-on-one fights become slogfests that can go on for over twenty minutes until one party runs out of resources. Or, in a far more likely outcome, both parties decide to call it quits; a long zero-sum battle of attrition is not everyone's cup of tea.
Unless, of course, it's not a symmetrical battle. You could just be on a 'thopter, and gun them down with missiles. There's no counter to that. Dune Awakening is a game about supply logistics, and vehicles of ordnance are the endgame.
As for the actual large-scale GvG zerg fights over a well of melange, I have not experienced any personally. Things are quiet in my server's Deep Desert at the time of writing, and we still haven't seen enough action. I fear tactical out-smarting may not exactly be present in it, and it would instead only have the first-time theatrical value of mayhem.
The verdict
Dune Awakening has many ways to kill you — each one a trial by fire you learn to survive.
If you run headfirst into an enemy camp and get jumpscared by three heavy machine-guns, you die. If you get too dehydrated (easy if you're not sheltered), you eventually die. If you try to cross the desert without learning the distance a sandworm can cover in the blink of an eye, you die.
In the daytime, the unrelenting heat of the sun whittles you down, and at night, Sardukar patrols chase you away. I was repairing my bike during a sandstorm, and it exploded on me, and I almost died. If the game didn't have a hand-holding Journey system to tutorialize you in the first few hours, it would be as unforgiving as Kenshi.
All of this is working just as intended, and it would not be Dune without it. Ultimately, it's a game with some solid combat, fun gathering loop, feature-complete base-building, and above all, a massive scale of content that goes above and beyond your initial impression.
Did you know there are multiple in-game radio stations with hours of faction propaganda, dope synth music, and complete radio dramas? The game certainly never tells you, yet it's been there all along.
Twenty hours into my run, I discovered that the slavers and scavengers actually fight each other in contested territories, and this is no window dressing. The scorching sands of Dune Awakening hide more than they show, and there's a great deal to uncover indeed.
Hypothetically, even if you are not into PvP at all, Dune Awakening presents is still a behemoth of a game. Sure, the Deep Desert is much bigger with its procgen freedom, but the smaller Hagga Basin map takes nearly an hour to get from corner to corner, and I'm talking about riding an endgame Ornithopter.
With the season pass and more free updates that Funcom seems to have in the tank, it might be even bigger than that in time. For now, Dune Awakening has captivated me even though I have no prior attachments to its world and lore.
The climbing system may be janky and uncharitable even a year later, and yet Dune Awakening will still be one of the most fulfilling survival games of this decade, as long as you learn to take it at its own pace. Bi-La Khaifa.
Dune Awakening
Reviewed On: PC (Key provided by Funcom)
Developer: Funcom
Publisher: Funcom
Release Date: June 10, 2025
