Dune: Awakening Review
A Lone Man's Journey Through Arrakis
“Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.'
- from "Collected Sayings of Maud'Dib'' by the Princess Irulan”.
Prior to Dune: Awakening, I had never experienced a Funcom multiplayer title. The only Funcom games I’d played were Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden and Metal: Hellsinger. I enjoyed both of them, but that didn’t stop me from cringing when I saw the first CGI trailer for Dune: Awakening.
Don’t get me wrong, the trailer looked excellent, that is until the screen faded to black and presented me with the line “A DUNE OPEN WORLD SURVIVAL MMO”. “Boo!” said I into the void, feeling toyed with. I didn’t want an MMO in Arrakis, I wanted to brave the hellish landscape by myself in a carefully built ruthless world.
Thankfully, I’ve now learned that Funcom doesn’t do MMO the way I’m used to. World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2. I’ve tried them all, always accompanied by people who know a lot more than me and who are lending a helping hand, easing me into that behemoth of a genre. Regardless, I’ve always quietly left them there, wishing I enjoyed those games as much as they do.
Dune: Awakening has nearly nothing in common with any of those games. In fact, it is almost exactly what I thought Funcom were robbing me of when they hit me with the “Open World Survival MMO” tagline. After over 42 hours evading the mighty Shai-Hulud and fearing the Sun more than I did in my vampire run of Oblivion: Remastered, I’m here to tell you of my lone journey through the often beautiful land of Arrakis.
Visuals
One of the main selling points of Dune: Awakening prior to release was that it was a Unreal Engine 5 game. That got a lot of people excited, especially the ones who’d seen the UE5 tech demo with the female protagonist exploring a desert landscape. How hard could it be to render a desert, after all?
Harder than it looks, I would wager. Arrakis might be a desert, but it is by no means empty. There are points of interest everywhere you look. Huge rocks loom on the horizon, calling you to explore them. Verticality is a huge part of the visual design of Funcom’s Arrakis. You’ll rarely look around without finding a few tall structures to explore.
UE5’s lighting system, Lumen, isn’t perfectly implemented here, often coming off broken inside your base. Where it succeeds is at portraying the stark difference between the scorching Sun of Arrakis and the darkness of the hidden caves and deep Imperial Testing Stations. If you go into a “dungeon” at night and leave it after the Sun has come up, you get the flashbang moment of the impossibly bright Sun being reflected by the sand.
Arrakeen and Harko Village look excellent, and so do the trading posts spread throughout Arrakis. Everything seems carefully placed to make sense in this inhospitable place. If you arrive at a tradepost right after a Sandstorm has passed, you’ll see that the large gates are still in the process of opening, dropping sand as they slowly move into place. If you left your vehicle— vehicles are another excellent part of Dune: Awakening’s visual design— exposed during a Sandstorm, it will be convincingly covered in sand.
Where Dune: Awakening falters visually is in the character department. Faces often look weird, floaty, as if devoid of the realistic lighting that covers everything else. This is especially problematic when it comes to the player character, who features prominently during cutscenes, but it also happens to most other NPCs that are shown relatively close to the “camera”. Armor and animations are usually pretty good, though.
Sound
I have no notes for Funcom’s sound department here— not that I would be qualified to give any. Every decision that was made regarding sound is nigh-on perfect. Music is rare and sparse. You’ll often be left to wallow in the discreet ambiance of Arrakis, which will in turn be brutally interrupted by an explosion in the horizon, or a Shai-Hulud sighting off in the distance.
Sandstorms are loud and oppressive, vehicles are noisy but not obnoxious, guns sound pleasant and the shields match what was done in the Denis Villeneuve movies. The recent movies’ influence on the game’s sound design is evident, and a no-brainer. Why would you improve on perfection?
Voice acting is usually good to great, and learning extra lore through voice recordings left throughout Arrakis is an excellent choice. It is usually believable, and also serves as an sort of mini podcast to keep you company while you explore Imperial Testing Stations or hostile Outposts.
Building
I’m not a building type of guy. I rarely play games like this at all, let alone by myself. When I played V Rising I let my friend Belgorg do all the planning and decorating of the castle, while I was happily killing bosses and bringing back materials. My Subnautica base was purely pragmatic and looked horrendous. All decoration of my Animal Crossing house was done by my girlfriend.
Yet, I was left to my own devices in Dune: Awakening. After all, this is a lone man’s journey through Arrakis. I fully expected a repeat of my Subnautica experience. Instead, I spent more than half of my first couple of days in Arrakis building a base that I would have to abandon shortly after (I didn’t know this at the time, but I don’t regret it one bit).
Building in Dune: Awakening is everything that I’ve ever wanted from a game like this. It is quick, easy, intuitive, versatile and, most crucial of all, beautiful. Even a curmudgeon like me can build a nice looking base without much time invested. Of course, it still looks like a dump next to the impressive specimens posted in the game’s subreddit, but it looks good enough to make me feel an odd sense of pride.
Combat
I would’ve loved to see an impressive, deep combat system in Dune: Awakening, but I’m also aware of the physical and logistical limitations that Funcom are under. This game is a huge undertaking as it is, and it will remain so (hopefully) for years to come.
At the time of writing, the game’s combat is fine. It usually works, often with a bit of jank in the mix. I overlook a lot that doesn’t work because I genuinely love the skills that Funcom put into Dune. Classes feel distinct and lore-accurate (within reason), both melee and ranged playstyles are viable for PVE, and both are fun to play.
Luckily, that’s more than enough for my enjoyment of Dune Awakening for one crucial reason: combat isn’t the focus of your time spent in Arrakis.
Exploration
Arrakis is a planet that will never cease to fascinate me. Despite my issues with the Villeneuve movies, I loved watching them because I felt that I was seeing the best visual portrayal of Arrakis ever created. That remains true to this day, but the sense of immersion that Dune: Awakening gives me is not possible to emulate outside of a videogame.
Travelling through Arrakis alone is never boring, even over 42 hours in. Whether you are walking through the sand looking for another patch of plants to stay hydrated, riding your Sandbike through huge dunes, or carrying back tons of minerals on your Buggy, Arrakis will always have something to show you.
Even when riding through familiar places you might bump into an impressive base built by a guild of dedicated players that wasn’t there the previous day; the Shai-Hulud might be eating a poor soul in the distance, devouring their precious Sandbike in the process; a Sandstorm might be looming in the horizon, forcing you to adapt on the fly and scramble for a place to find shelter in.
Heading into unexplored territory is legitimately terrifying. Those few minutes between crossing a regional border and finding a high-enough vantage point from which to shoot a Survey Probe are genuinely nerve-wracking, but also filled with wonder.
Vertical exploration takes Dune: Awakening to the next level, and forces players to leave the safety of their vehicles behind, at least until they manage to craft their first Ornithopter— which will be very late game for any solo player. Players have a multitude of tools to assist in their climbs, alongside the famous Breath of the Wild climb everything system.
But Dune: Awakening didn’t just borrow that system from Nintendo’s masterpiece, it also used the game as inspiration and succeeded in creating the similarly addictive loop of climbing a huge rock only to find an even bigger one to climb next, or a towering building that you can’t resist visiting.
The Magic Of The Daring
Dune: Awakening isn’t perfect, but it is even better than my wildest dreams. It would be easy to cash out on one of the hottest franchises in the current multimedia landscape. Sony could’ve gotten the keys to the castle and made yet another AAA third person single-player story. It would’ve surely been good, but it would’ve felt old.
Instead, Funcom took a massive risk with a gamble on the cutthroat live-service market, where even endless pits of money fail, and have succeeded, so far. They know what they’re good at, they’re learning from previous mistakes, and they love the project.
Awakening’s edges might be rougher than some of the rocky mountains we encounter in Arrakis, but it can be as addictive as the Spice that’s so prized in the Dune universe. Don’t be discouraged by all the discourse surrounding solo play and the “Deep Desert issues”. There are over 40 hours of content in playing through the main story Journeys alone, and many more if you’re into building or farming.
If neither of those two aspects call to you, Arrakis is so well realized that I recommend this to any Dune fan out there. Even if you build the most basic base possible and craft nothing other than what you’re required to, there are dozens of hours of fun awaiting you in Dune: Awakening, which is a lot more than what games selling for 60€+ have been delivering lately.
Only time will tell where Funcom will take this precious gem next. They might turn it into the most precious metal in the industry, or squander it, abandoned to be forgotten amongst the endless sandy dunes filled with the carcasses of many live-service failures.
Regardless, I hope they keep taking risks and leaving the safe roads for the AAA studios dumping hundreds of millions into every game they release. As the Bene Gesserit proverb goes:
Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
Excellent piece, I had a very similar return to Earth when “open-world survival MMO” popped up way back then as it’s not a genre I’ve ever particularly enjoyed.
Very useful for me to read a review from someone using that same perspective, and now tempted to give it the benefit of the doubt!
Thanks for the review. I'm very tempted to get this. Might do so later this year once it's settled in some more.