Dune: Awakening review

I'm standing in the desert scooping up big clumps of the most valuable substance in the universe, spice, when a sandworm explodes out of the dunes a few meters in front of me. I knew it was coming—it always does—but I didn't expect it to arrive so quickly or so close to me. I yell a bad word and leap into the cockpit of my ornithopter as my entire screen fills with a gaping mouth the size of a subway tunnel.

I know I'm just sitting at my desk holding down my space bar, but in my head I'm pulling up on the control stick of my ornithopter with all my strength as bad words continue to pour out of me. If this worm swallows me I'll lose everything: my 'thopter, the spice in my pockets, everything else in my pockets, and even the pockets themselves. I'll respawn in just my undies and have to re-craft my armor, weapons, tools, and vehicle. Fear is the mind-killer, but a sandworm is the gear-killer.

I gain just enough altitude to escape, but I legitimately have to take a few moments for my heart to stop pounding before I can set back down on the sand to continue my spice collecting. The prospect of losing everything to a sandworm is just one reason why even 100 hours in, Dune: Awakening is still a thrill.

Funcom's survival MMO is a lot of things: a compelling PvE sandbox you can play alone, a co-op survival game you can conquer with friends, and a cutthroat PvP extraction game that doesn't even enter the mix until you've played for about 80 hours. Some of this Funcom pulls off successfully, some is a bit rough, but the parts of Dune: Awakening that work are great enough to justify enduring the stuff that doesn't.

Thirst aid

The opening hours of Dune: Awakening do what every survival game should: make you feel fragile, weak, and desperate. In this alt-history version of Arrakis, the planet is in the midst of a protracted civil war between House Atreides and the Harkonnens—which helps explain why the desert is absolutely littered with spaceship wreckage you can harvest for crafting.

The only source of water in those early hours is licking dew from a few scattered plants, the sun is so scalding you have to creep between the shadows, and at night Sardaukar ships patrol the skies sending down heavily-armed assassins to waste you if you're spotted.

It's a suitably tough introduction to the dangers of the desert planet, but you're not powerless for long. Within a few hours you'll have the tools to build your first base and even craft a vehicle to begin braving the dunes and sandworms that lurk beneath it.

Dune: Awakening's survival loop can get pretty grindy. There's an early stage where the only worthwhile source of water is blood, and I found myself regularly stopping what I was doing just to make joyless blood runs: completing quick circuits of the same handful of NPC caves and camps to suck 'em dry. There was one NPC in a camp about 10 meters from my front door, and I must have killed and drank that dude a few dozen times alone.

More elegant water collection options eventually appear, like tools that harvest dew from plants and windtraps that capture moisture from the air, though as crafting gets more complex it requires shocking amounts of water, meaning it's never a bad time to cosplay a desert vampire and collect a few extra liters of blood. Stockpiling other resources in the mid-to-late game grows monotonous, too: some only appear as loot in certain NPC strongholds, and only in small amounts, which means repeatedly raiding the same locations.

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But there's also the kind of grind I really enjoy. I love hopping in a buggy and driving out for a resource run, using a mining laser to extract minerals from boulders in the mountains or crystals in the murky ravines. I'm always happy to fly my 'thopter out to the dunes to collect a resource called flour sand, dodging the angry sandworms that show up every few minutes.

When the survival systems don't solely rely on killing the same NPCs over and over, there's an enjoyable routine that emerges (#desertlife), which includes patching up degraded gear and spot welding vehicles to repair their components. These rituals make me feel less like a murderer and more like someone trying to carve out a life on an inhospitable planet.

Whatcha Dune?

Progression doesn't just lead to better weapons and gear but the feeling that you're becoming more a part of the Dune universe, and I get a little buzz every time I advance enough to craft something from the fiction.

Remember in Villeneuve's first Dune movie when Duke Leto gets shot in the back? He's got his shield on which protects him fast-moving blades and projectiles, but the dart slowly burrows through Leto's shield until it incapacitates him. I've got a gun that does that now, called a drillshot, and it's sick.

The effect even looks the same as it does in the movie, with the hovering dart turning the blue shield red as it burrows through to find the vulnerable body of whatever unlucky NPC I've shot it at. We also have a few Fremen deathstills (seen in Dune: Part Two) at my guild's base that we can stick bodies in to convert them into water.

It's gross to have corpses gently being liquified into drinking water, but also pretty darn cool. Hunter-seeker drones, ornithopters, Holtzman shields, chrysknives: even as a casual Dune fan it's hard not to get excited when creating and using such iconic technology.

The world is genuinely impressive for its incredible verticality—in both directions. There are towering cliffs and spires between the dunes, and a ravine that stretches across an entire region that's so deep I thought at first it must just be a bottomless void that you're meant to avoid falling into. Nope. There's a bottom to it, but it's so far down you can't even see it.

Getting around the map is a blast, too, because you can climb anything, at least as long as your stamina holds out. Throw in a grappling hook and suspensors you can yoink yourself upwards and then continue rocketing skyward, or glide hundreds of meters down without taking fall damage.

Other conveniences, like being able to store sandbikes and ornithopters inside a special tool in your inventory, are pretty silly: like your horse in Elden Ring, you can summon your bike or 'thopter whenever you need it and pocket it when you don't. But it's all part of a travel system that shows Funcom wanted its world to be a playground, not a chore, to traverse.

Game over, man!

The most controversial part of Dune: Awakening (if the sheer number of Reddit posts are to be believed) is the endgame. First is the Landsraad, a vague attempt at a political framework that's part resource-collection and crafting chores, part PvP, and weirdly, part bingo card. It's realized with a 5x5 grid of tasks that refresh each week, which if completed by players of one faction locks out the players of the other and lets the winner vote on the enactment of a new weekly server setting, like access to unique vendors or reduced crafting costs.

To win the weekly Landsraad, one faction must make a bingo by completing a line of five tasks (up, down, or diagonally), so there's some strategy involved in not just trying to complete your own row but block your opponents.

Hot take: I dig it. One afternoon as some Landsraad tasks appeared, my guild leader and I scurried around to fulfil them. One task was to deliver gems which are only found in buried caches, so we each mounted scanners on our 'thopters and barrelled out over the desert to dig them up while dodging sandworms and patches of quicksand. We later mass produced a bunch of knives for another task and raced out to kill members of an NPC faction for another.

Dashing around to complete these milestones is grindy but fun, and it feels pretty satisfying to see a task completed knowing you contributed—not to mention that you earn rewards like money or gear for pitching in.

The problem with the Landsraad is that if I hadn't logged in that day, or even during those particular few hours, I'd have missed all that fun. Even on the medium population server I play on, the Landsraad bingo board was completed barely two days into the new week. I like that just a couple of players working together can have an impact on the endgame in a relatively short amount of time, but it's less great that the winner of the political bingo match can be determined in such a short amount of time.

As players reach the endgame and start stockpiling obscene amounts of materials in their bases, I have a hard time imagining how this system will continue to be a satisfying one—especially for more casual players who mainly get time with the game in the evenings or on weekends.

Ornery 'thopters

The highest tier resources, which are needed to craft endgame vehicles and weapons, can only be found in the deep desert, a majority PvP zone many times larger than the PvE map. That's also where you'll find rare blueprints for the best gear and industrial amounts of spice. Even a quick raid on an NPC base in the deep desert will quickly fill your pockets with incredibly useful loot, and after my first visit, all I wanted to do was go back. The problem? There's a bunch more sandworms trying to eat you and a ton of other players looking to gank you.

I haven't done a ton of PvP in Dune: Awakening, and though I've lost all but a single fight I still mostly enjoy it. Compared with the brain-dead NPCs, it's exciting to see players using their skills and weapons unpredictably, even when they're using them to ruin my day.

Take the guy I callously sniped while he was exploring a shipwreck in the deep desert: I felt bad for downing him because he had no idea I was even there, so I let him self-revive. He then proceeded to utterly wreck me with some stuns, a grenade, and then some well-delivered knife blows. (He did not return the favor and allow me to self-revive.)

The rest of PvP in the endgame zone is mostly done with choppers and rockets—which feels like an odd design choice in a game where we spend nearly a hundred hours building up skills that have nothing to do with airborne combat. It can be brutal: I've been chased halfway across the map while being ruthlessly pummeled by missiles from other 'thopters, but I don't really hate it. I like the risk of making excursions into the PvP zone, same as how I like tempting fate with sandworms. This is Arrakis, after all. I don't expect to always make it out in one piece.

I've enjoyed nearly all of my time in Dune: Awakening. I like most of the survival grind, there's tons of Dune tech that feels really cool to craft and use even if you aren't up on 4,000 years' worth of Duncan Idaho lore, and I mostly dig the endgame systems, even though they're a bit oddly designed.

The best compliment I can bestow is that even after 100 hours, when I see a sandworm breach or I hear another player's 'thopter approaching, Dune: Awakening still makes my heart pound.