Dune: Awakening review

A survival game lives or dies on the personality of its world. Subnautica is a wonder because its world is a wonder. Abiotic Factor is a cracking farce because its world is a lab staffed by idiots. Dune: Awakening, meanwhile, has the fortune of coming with a pre-packaged world, already built by scores of sci-fi novels and movies full of beautiful scowlers. Developers Funcom therefore have existing rules to play with, a culture and geography which is basically ready-made for a video game. It’s almost cheating. Sandstorms rage, forcing you indoors. Sandworms give chase, prompting you to run or bike faster across the desert. Military ships scan the dunes at night with spotlights, and launch tough enemy patrols if you get caught. Everything here already lends itself to the kind of adventurous fantasy any hardy video gameser would like.

Yet introduce to this the long-established survival tropes of online multiplayer crafting games, and you walk away with something that is somehow both fitting to Frank Herbert’s world and comically incongruous. A very hot Valheim. You scrounge endlessly not for spice but for rocks and twigs. You slap little devices down not to attract worms, but as spawn points. You drive your sandbike across the desert, then take out a magical Ghostbusters device that slurps the vehicle inside so you can carry it around safely in your pocket. For every line of dialogue delivered with the seriousness of a 19th century naval captain, there is a moment when you catapult yourself 50 feet into the sky with a grappling hook and tumble to earth in front of a robotic NPC who doesn’t see you. There are comedy radio stations and they are playing chiptune. This is Dune, yes, but it is also Dunc.

Awakening is set in an alternate universe of Dune in which Timothee Chalamet forgot to be born. The conflict over the desert planet remains a slow-burning stand-off between two factions: the honour-obsessed Atreides and the aggressively pale-faced Harkonnen. You’ll get to pick a side in this kerfuffle in later missions. But first, you land as a love survivor, told to seek out the native people of the planet, the Fremen, who have supposedly been wiped out. Thus the grand space opera is magnified down a powerful microscope to become a survival and crafting game with shooty dart guns and griddy base-building. We can perhaps call it a very sandy Animal Crossing. Perhaps.

The various survival systems reinforce all the childlike fantasies of living on Arrakis. A heat meter rises whenever you stay in direct sunlight. “Better stick to the shade,” you chuckle. Another little waveform meter appears when you cross open tracts of desert sand, a measurement of how likely you are to attract a huge sandworm. “Better get across this gap fast,” you snicker. Your thirst meter goes into its last quadrant, threatening health loss. “Better drink 300 millilitres of my own recycled piss,” you think to yourself with a chortle. Press the F key to slurp on the straw of your urinal tuxedo.

I played as a Trooper, a character class that is all about mobility and ranged firepower. They get a handy skill that throws out a bubble which slows time and prevents fall damage. Even handier, they get a grappling hook, as well as a bunch of grenades and buffs to gun damage. Other types of sand tourist are available. You can be a Bene Gesserit (a space nun), and learn to convince enemies that you’re invisible, or become immune to poison. As a Swordmaster you can deflect enemy projectiles and learn to recuperate stamina faster.

You’re forced to pick only one class as a starting option, but you soon find special characters who open up the other skill trees. For example, you can discover a Planetologist hiding in the earliest zone who will unlock the skills of that class, provided you complete a short fetch quest. It was worth this detour for the passive benefits of the Planetologist: a longer battery life for techy tools and a buff to stamina while climbing. Ah, very important in an open world that has embraced the “climb any surface” philosophy of Breath Of The Wild. I basically did everything possible to turn my character into a kind of bloodthirsty Link. He has a shotgun and he ascends rocks very well.

Putting that firearm to use is mostly an expressionless and dead-brained exercise in finding a baddie and shooting them like a harmless lamb. Combat can be as simple as spitting your machine gun or pistol at these barrelfish, along with a rare moment when you have to switch to a dagger to puncture the shield of some close-combat warjerk charging toward you. True to the source material, the best way to break enemy shields is with a strongly held stabbing attack, though unweildy parrying and cumbersome target tracking led me to avoiding melee combat wherever possible.

Usually you only face a handful of scumbags at once, and you can use your abilities to supplement these brawls. As a Trooper I could lob little seeker missiles, or stun enemies with my grappling wire. But for the most part, you can put a few bullets into any belly and your foes will eventually fall flat. They are barely sentient rodents, seemingly easy to kill by design. After all, to earn the water needed to survive you must farm the blood of your felled enemies and pass it through an extraction machine in your home base. Making baddies easy to kill perhaps lightens the load for players who just want water fast.

This, along with some very plain level design, makes the combat feel functional yet never truly slick or smooth. If you compare Duwakening’s action to, say, other MMO-ish shooters, you’ll feel a big difference. There’s no additional layer of combat nuance like the sticky cover of the Division games, no dancelike fluidity as in Warframe. And the dungeons are formulaic corridor-room-corridor affairs without much flair.

As is often a complaint in MMOs, these roomy holes feel like mere wells for ratty enemies, rather than having any of their own meaning or identity. They have audio logs and holograms littered about in an attempt to give each dungeon some sense of place, but this too is subject to formula – the same scientist type gives the same kind of speech as the last scientist type about the same environment with the same voice. Injecting variety to MMO environments which exist only to be looted on repeat is a task of narrative triage I do not envy. The dialogue elsewhere does manage to bring some colour to the dodgy water merchants and haughty space nobles of the game, even if the overwhelming amount of lore terminology makes some lines unreadable to a Dune agnostic.

You can – if you prefer an opponent who might actually hurt you – get into PvP scrapes by visiting ship crash sites, or by flying off the edge of the map and entering a much bigger PvP zone called the Deep Desert, which can house hundreds of players at once. This is a high-risk, high-reward expedition that’ll entice a certain kind of adrenaline fiend while repelling anyone who prefers their survival stories to play out as solitary conquests against nature. Years ago, in my Dark Zone liking days, I would have belonged to the former camp. But I find myself enjoying the survivalist trials of Arrakis most when done in isolation.

You might have friends for co-op though, folks who can help gather granite for the walls of your home base. This base building is another classic survival game affair of modular blocky wall placement. You place down foundations and ceilings and windowed walls on a strict grid. The resultant player homes are not very “Dune” when compared to the striking architecture of the movies. Where Denis Villeneuve can hire artists to design awe-inspiring brutalist ziggurats, you will create a boxy abode that is the sci-fi equivalent of a Croydon apartment block. You might unlock new structural blueprints as you go, and the natural creativity of players can still sometimes produce an interesting looking home. Largely, though, I found the building process dry and basic.

The visual language of Dune is grand. It is of a scale that dwarfs a lonely sand tourist. Some of that translates to Awakening, as with the hovering Sardaukar ships that scan the environment, or the palacial corridors in ruined substructures. But in other places, that visual design falters into a lacklustre genericism. Much of the beveled machinery you create in your base looks vaguely the same. The power generators, chemical refineries, fabricators, ore refineries, blood enwaternators – they all appear as homogenous tubegizmos. And mechanistically, they all adhere to well-worn survival game principles: you need stuff to make more stuff to make more stuff to make more stuff.

In hubzones, the geometric griddiness of that same visual design sometimes suits the otherworldly feeling of MMO levels – disjointed right angled corridors and military symmetry – but in other places, the grand scale actually works against the standard principles of MMO task-completing. Vast concrete lobbies and spaces can take a relatively long time to cross, just to speak to a random character about the 100 do-hickeys they wanted. The city of Arrakeen is a stony warren of rooms that all feel much bigger than they really need to be, which is both fitting for the overbearing nature of Dune’s palaces and vexing to the average player concerned with resource gathering, XP-scrounging, and other ideals of efficiency.

My point, again, is that Duwakening is a game where a desire for strong atmosphere becomes messily entwined with a traditional type of MMO design centred on gettin’ more stuff. Not in a bad way, per se, but in a noticeably gamey way. Gargantuan worms threaten you during long treks across dunes; let’s stop to harvest 20 floursand! Heatstroke and duststorms will force you to take shelter in the shade of a downed ship; let’s cut it up for salvaged metal! A camp of scavengers stands between you and the safety of home; mmmm, BLOOD!

As a game it is funny, enjoyable, jarring, and safe. There is a large amount of stabbing corpses unintentionally in their groin for blood. As with many a craft ’em up, the opening is enough of a stroll to ease you into the world, its rules and quirks. This intro demurely suggests the game will be more merciful with your time than others of its ilk. Sand dweller, this is not true. There are still crafting bottlenecks – gizmos and trinkets you need to farm from particular sites. And you will eventually hit a plateau, when the research menu opens up into a larger array of improved items (power packs, shields, dew scythes) and you are suddenly overcome with a great greed for different coloured rocks.

At this point gathering material becomes the second job most MMOs are wont to be (at least, this is how it felt as a solo player). I would have sobbed at the hefty crafting costs of an ornithopter were I not concerned about wasting the water from my eyes. That’s not to mention the ongoing needs of maintaining your base, your mining equipment, and your other vehicles. As both an MMO and a survival game, much of this is to be expected. The genre is a playful reproduction of that most gagsome economic reality: the cost of living. We play these games, sometimes, despite ourselves.

As survival games go, however, I cannot call it “bad”. Fair warning: there are weird glitches and choppiness (one bug saw me backdashing every time I exited the inventory screen). And I had to abandon playing on a controller because of the obnoxious virtual cursor in menus. But this wasn’t enough to interrupt my bloodsucking. Awakening is dense with lore, and loyal to the childlike “sand is lava” flavours of Dune. I’ve enjoyed it for the strength of its world, and I admire how straightforwardly Funcom have adapted the memorable features of Herbert’s fiction in exactly the most sensible way. If you walked out of the cinema after the Dune movies of recent years only to have your thoughts and dreams peppered with imagery from those films, then this is probably one of the best ways to visit and inhabit that distant desert. Just so long as you acknowledge, going in, that you’ll be doing a lot more rock mining, water farming, and unexpected laughing than Timothee ever did.

This review is based on retail code provided by the publisher.