Dune: Awakening review – A fun, if frustrating, romp through Arrakis

​​Dropped into the Hagga Basin on a mission to awaken the Fremen, the player is guided through surviving Arrakis by Zantara (Daniel Bonjour), an elusive criminal with a bounty on his head.

What follows is a scramble to find water, salvage resources, and uncover the lost tribe.

As Paul Atreides narrates in the game’s intro sequence, this is a world in which the events of Dune never took place, a world tinged with hope: "All my visions lead to horror, except this one."

Deeply immersive, and great for hardcore survival players looking for a challenge, Dune: Awakening’s survival mechanics make for a gruelling beginning.

In the original Dune, Herbert wrote, "Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty." For better and worse, this motto applies to Dune: Awakening’s gameplay.

Avoiding dehydration, sun stroke, and sandworms is a constant challenge (food is thankfully not a prominent mechanic). Once the player has set up a base, enemies supply a steady, and only slightly gruesome, source of water.

Committed to a desert lifestyle, players are expecting to stay on the move, with replicators available to transport base blueprints between zones. Sandstorms that sweep past further ground players in desert life, but can leave you stuck in your base with little to do.

Unsurprisingly, sandworms, the Shai-Hulud, are one of the game’s most effective mechanics. Travelling across sand for too long creates vibrations that draw the colossal creatures to you, separating zones and providing a constant threat of cosmic horror.

But where the game sometimes innovates, it can at times become bogged down by uninspired side quests, difficulty disparities, and a jolted story progression.

Set in a sandswept desert, Dune: Awakening gets away with repetitive biomes by virtue of its breathtaking landscapes. Combined with a compelling score by Knut Avenstroup Haugen (Conan Exiles, The Lords of the Fallen), the game creates a rich, heavy, and surprisingly colourful atmosphere.

Filled with secrets, overgrown wildlife, and hanging corpses, Imperial Testing Stations make for exhilarating exploration. These locations, littered with broken lab equipment and thriving greenery, allow players to glimpse into Dune: Awakening’s rich lore. They are also, surprisingly, terrifying.

Other locations fail to capture the imagination for quite as long. Shipwrecks are relatively easy to traverse and enemies can be killed quickly. Hidden locations – hydration sealed caves with booby traps and ancient art – offer few resources of value, and minimal challenge.

Resources, except for water, are surprisingly abundant, and with items resetting after only a few minutes, there is not much need for exploration.

One mechanic that could have helped solve this issue is climbing. Potentially one of the more exciting aspects of the game, climbing was riddled with bugs in my playthrough, leaving me stuck in the same spot while stamina rapidly depleted.

Where Arrakis feels mostly alive, its NPCs lack the same energy and interactions are limited, leaving side quests feeling dull.

Overall, with little motivation to explore or dwell, Arrakis quickly takes a backseat to progressing the story and fighting enemies.

Sadly, combat is one of the game’s main stumbling blocks.

Uneven combat difficulty and janky controls means enemies are either too easy to kill, or swarm your character quickly. Moreover, enemies lack spatial awareness, pursuing you further than you think or getting stuck behind easily circumventable obstacles.

Without much scope for stealth, players are left to go in guns blazing, with their fighting abilities initially defined by their choice of House.

That isn’t to say these fights aren’t a lot of fun, but they can be frustrating.

In new biomes, enemies are almost unbeatable until you upgrade, at which point the gravity of battle is lost. This difficulty disparity takes a lot of the fun out of PvE (player versus enemy).

Less common PvP (player versus player) locations do exist, though players can easily flee these fights.

Ultimately, Dune: Awakening is a good game whose failings are inseparable from its genre.

While the story and survival objectives are interlinked, they can’t always function together. Juggling your quest for the Fremen with survival needs, and the elusive Zantara’s guidance, makes for a disjointed experience.

Instead of being led by curiosity, I found myself constantly checking the Journey menu to figure out my next steps.

The story does, however, show moments of utter brilliance.

Trials take the form of platformers with beautiful design and writing, while the Imperial Testing Stations make for terrific environmental storytelling. Daniel Bonjour’s performance as Zantara is captivating, as is the rest of the cast.

But these stellar moments risk being lost within the game's sprawling gameplay, and I cannot help but wonder if the expansive world comes at the expense of a more enjoyable experience.

With distinctive challenges, rich worldbuilding, and an expansion pack already in progress, Dune: Awakening is an impressive game that will only improve with time. I, for one, can’t wait to keep playing and watch it grow. I just wish it would hurry up a little.

Dune: Awakening launches on 10th June at 3pm BST for PC. The game will come to Xbox Series X/S and PS5 at later date. We reviewed on PC.

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