Frank Herbert’s Dune series is one of the most influential stories ever told. It has spawned many films, TV shows, comics and video games that have brought millions into the world of Arrakis and the struggle of the Atreides family. Dune: Awakening is a love letter to this beloved series, and it’s been painstakingly created to make you feel like you are a desert wanderer in the Dune universe. You have to fight and crawl your way through the savage clans and navigate the political unrest between rival factions as you slowly uncover who you are and what brought you to Arrakis. This brings us to the main question with this game adaptation: what secrets does the desert of Dune hold?
Dune: Awakening is A Slow Grind
After creating your character, choosing your starting class and completing the opening mission which finds you crashlanding in the middle of the Hagga Basin, a section of the Arrakis desert that has been split into territories by marauding desert clans, you are almost immediately thrown into the survival aspects of Dune: Awakening. You will have to learn how to forage for water, where certain minerals can be found and how to defend yourself from enemies and the desert heat. Like many other games in the survival genre, there is a steep learning curve at first. Learning your surroundings and how to maintain your hydration levels while surviving with the most basic of weapons and armor takes patience that many may be turned off by. To illustrate my point, it took a little over ten hours for me to get past the opening section of the Hagga Basin.
Those ten hours were spent learning where enemy camps were located, finding ore and rocks to help build basic armor and weapons and learning how to find water in the harsh environment. It is a very slow grind that, arguably, is necessary to understand the main gameplay loop of its systems. I’m sure some people who are more familiar with survival games could feel like Dune: Awakening should take the training wheels off faster and let the player have full access to mechanics and map of Arrakis, however. The first real mission chain of the game will take most players around 30-40 hours to complete, and you won’t have access to all of your abilities and survival schematics unless you complete them. That is a long time to ask players to invest before they have a real idea of how all the systems work together and what Awakening has to offer.
While some may think they can cut into this time by trying to focus on these opening quests, most of them are found in areas with much stronger enemies and require gear that you will not be able to forge without finding the right materials. A large amount of these materials are found in caves, shipwrecks, research centers or enemy bases, so you’ll have to grind runs through these mini-dungeons until you have enough materials to craft the necessary armor to help fight off the increasing desert heat in higher areas and the higher-tier enemies. Unless you know exactly where to go or are following a guide, there is not a lot of ways to shorten the tutorial questlines. Those who do persevere through this opening grind will find that Awakening has more up its sleeves than what you may think at first.
Over and Over Again
Classes and skill trees give you a decent amount of abilities to mess around with and find out exactly what kit works best for your approach to combat and survival. The passive abilities you can gain from these skill trees are extremely helpful throughout the game. These passives range anywhere from doing extra damage on headshots to raising your tolerance to the heat of Arrakis or just raising your max health. It doesn’t seem like much at first, but these bonuses add up and really help your odds out in the desert.
However, I feel that the actual classes themselves lack an identity. Regardless of which classes I unlocked and worked through their skill tree, I felt that my approach to combat barely changed. There is a distinct focus on ranged combat for most encounters, and the melee combat seems to be saved for encounters with boss enemies and the occasional knife or sword user. This wouldn’t be such as issue if the core combat in the game was challenging or introduced new ideas, but it isn’t and it doesn’t. This leads me to one of my biggest gripes with Dune: Awakening—enemy variety.
Enemies from each faction you encounter throughout the game are mainly just palette swaps of each other and can be broken down into four categories: melee, ranged, sniper and heavy units. Maybe if each of these factions had different strategies or gimmicks, it would give them more personality, but the most they change is what grenade type they use, and the heavy units using either a gatling gun or a flamethrower. I wish that Awakening took some time to give each of these enemy factions more personality or diverse designs to really separate them from each other.
I also was disappointed that you never come across any enemies piloting vehicles throughout the game. You will come across enemy bases with these vehicles parked in them that are supposedly being used by this faction, but they are mainly there for you to try and steal or breakdown for parts. Having a couple boss encounters or interactions with enemy vehicles would have changed things up enough to where I felt like I was doing something different.
Life in the Desert
One thing that will surprise some is that Dune: Awakening is just as much of an RPG than it is a survival game. Throughout your time exploring the desert, you will come across characters who have their own reasons for being on Arrakis, along with questlines and stories that will unravel as you complete them. These questlines are surprisingly compelling and usually offer great rewards for those who go out of their way to complete them. I would highly recommend at least doing the quests that unlock skill trees in order to upgrade other classes in the game. This makes sure that you have access to as many of the passive abilities as possible.
The main story also manages to throw in some interesting missions and surprise reveals for those familiar with Dune lore. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself invested in the story in the last third of the game and really wanting to know where it was all leading to. Unfortunately, the main story “ends” after a tense mission where you learn some secrets about yourself and gain some information about what has been truly going on throughout Arrakis. Immediately after returning to your base after this mission you get a call that your main ally through this section of the game is going to have to go into hiding for a bit and they’ll contact you when they are free. That’s it, story over.
The story was seemingly building up momentum and then to just end right when you feel like the climax is coming is a major letdown. I know they will be adding future story updates as the game continues, but there should be some sense of finalization with the core game as it is. Where it stands now, the story feels like it is seventy-five percent done and left me wanting. I will stress that I enjoyed the story that is present in Dune: Awakening, but there are just some story threads that take too long to work through, and the conclusion feels abrupt and unfinished. I think there is a some great groundwork laid down here that will hopefully have some satisfying payoffs in the free story updates coming down the road.
Deep In the End Game
The abrupt ending of the game wouldn’t hurt so bad if there was interesting post-game content to interact with to hold you over until the new story updates are released. If you are primarily a PVE player, Dune: Awakening has very little to offer in the end game. The main post-game activity is in the Deep Desert, a large section that’s main draw is PVP action. In this zone, you will battle for resources and control points to build their factions rank. It creates a very hostile area that could really only be explored if in a guild or playing co-op with some friends in high level gear. This wouldn’t be such a problem if the highest tier materials that you need to craft the best gear in the game wasn’t locked behind the Deep Desert.
There has been an update that changes the Deep Desert making a large section of the map PVE with shipwrecks on the map still having PVP on them. However, this change has only amped the aggressiveness and territorial nature that was present before. Players will build walls around resource locations to prevent other players from accessing them in the PVE areas, and the other areas where these resources can be found are picked dry extremely fast. On top of this, the PVP side of the Deep Desert being more condensed causes it to be even more of a bloodbath with pockets of players waiting in ambush to easily overwhelm any poor soul that tries to dip their toes into that section.
There needs to be a better balance in the Deep Desert, or else I can see both sides of the PVP and PVE player base feeling unfulfilled and abandoning the game after a month or two. This would be a shame, as I think there is enough here to build upon that could turn into an incredible gaming experience. There just needs to be some more quality of life adjustments and balancing done to keep players engaged.
There’s Still Time to Grow in Dune: Awakening
Despite the issues I have with Dune: Awakening, I am completely invested in this game and cannot wait for more story content to be released. The post-game PVE leaves a lot to be desired and the cutthroat nature of the PVP makes it difficult for solo players to fit in, however. Add on the extremely slow grind the game starts off with and I can see a lot of players bouncing off early.
Those who decide to pick up Dune: Awakening have a tall mountain to climb ahead of them, but if they fight through the slower parts of the game’s progression, they will be rewarded with a well-executed story and some truly immersive survival experiences. There hasn’t been a survival game that has scratched this itch for me in quite some time, and I can’t wait to see where Funcom goes with Dune: Awakening next.
Disclaimer: Funcom provided a Steam key of Dune: Awakening to Final Weapon for review purposes.
