izigame.me

Fairly mixed, but leaning towards positive.

The game does a good job presenting Dune in a modern game. The visuals, sound overall environments are solidly good.
Base building and crafting is good enough for a survival game, with a decent balance and both containing and missing various QoL features.
Voice acting is on point, and the NPCs do their job of being quest givers with quirky personalities, albeit the story itself is more leaning into being an exposition piece about the Dune universe, less about presenting a captivating narrative.

The gameplay loop, initially, is a pretty great mix of exploration, survival, crafting, building and combat. It just clicks, and works. At some point, you figured out how the NPCs operate, though, and at that point combat becomes trivial. Ranged enemies do not understand line of sight, and will always aim center of mass even if you're peeking around a corner. Melee enemies are more of a threat, but limited by the fact you can freeclimb onto any obstacle (which they don't). Later tiers and areas scale up the NPC's health pools and damage, but outside of very few exceptions the approach to fighting them remains the same, just taking longer.

But, after all, PvE is just the leveling path to the PvP endgame content... which doesn't really exist, or work. There's virtually no ground PvP combat, because the Deep Desert pretty much forbids ground traversal, so everything is done with Thopters. Which means almost all PvP is just thopters exchanging rockets. And if you *do* end up in a rare instance of ground PvP combat by coming across a player inside of a PoI... you immedeately enter a stalemate as killed players can instantly respawn at the entrance of said PoI (with some neglegible durability damage).

But hey, it's still fun to fly around the Deep Desert and just enjoy the vast nothingness, as you have a sight range reaching kilometers, and a render distance for objects of 400m. There's also spice to harvest so you can... wait, *cannot* interact with the Landsraad, because it takes a guild of 6 people less than 5 hours to lock down all of the house votes that became available on a given day.

And then there's features like water/fuel on a world-map, which said resources being completely independent from their namesakes on your person/vehicle, auto-refreshing whenever you enter the world map, and with neither ever coming close to actually running out whilst you traverse it, making the entire system deprecated on launch.
Or the ability to survey the deep desert and craft charts, that you can then try to sell on one of the least user-firendly player-trade-hub implementation's I've seen, until you realize that there's 81 deep desert sectors and barely 20 slots to offer items for sale, and that it's made all redundant by the random guy who already posted screenshots of the deep desert map on the internet.


It's utterly frustrating to see a game, after having such a promising intro, prove all the haters and doomsayers right. And it *really* doesn't help that you also frequently have beta players chiming in, mentioning how these are all issues pointed out months ago, but not fixed regardless.

So, why is this a positive review? Because, in the end, I still got good 60 hours of singleplayer content out of the Hagga Basin. It's a decent action survival game set in the Dune universe, but whether it will ever be worth a long-term investment into play is very uncertain. The devs seem motivated, if nothing else, but the number of pointless or gimmicky game mechanics seems to hint that they may be too focussed on pursuing a vision of the game that just doesn't work out in practice.


Overall rating: 7/10
Good environment and setting, mediocre-to-passable execution, mostly dropping the ball on anything that is player-interaction or lategame.

TLDR: Game is reasonably priced and fun if you like PvP, but if you prefer playing solo or with friends or with mods then wait to see if the devs release the server files, or just buy Conan Exiles instead. And don't be fooled by the Season Pass which is actually just three skin packs, one small quest, and one new map next year.
Warning: in order to play this game you are forced to agree to an arbitration clause in their EULA, which is only shown to you after buying the game but before playing. can be previewed on the store page under the tags section.
I prefer playing games solo and I spent many hours in their previous game, Conan Exiles, which allowed players to play solo or co-op within the game itself and change a lot of intricate settings to customize the game how you like, and they also released server files before the launch of the game so that anyone could set up their own private server. That's why I was disappointed to see that the devs are currently refusing to release the server files, likely because they consider this game as an MMO, despite it being almost identical to Conan Exiles or ARK which are survival crafting games and not MMOs, same as Dune.
Dune Awakening has three maps to travel between, sure, but Conan Exiles players and ARK players know that it's not that hard to set up a private clustered server that allows travel between maps. Conan Exiles has 70 players per server while Dune Awakening only has 40 players per server until the endgame desert area which only has 100 players maximum per instance, while real MMO games usually have their player limit in the thousands. I've also heard that when travelling between the maps you will be placed in a queue, and since you need to visit the city often for quests, you will often be put back in a long queue every time you want to hand in a quest, completing certain main quests will cause you to travel between an instance and your main server, and each time you need to wait in queue again, which sounds like a nightmare for players during release.
I wasn't planning on buying this game at launch due to the lack of private servers and mods, but a few days ago they announced that they are partnering with three server hosting websites to allow players to rent a private server. However these servers still need to be arbitrarily connected in two of the three maps, justified by the devs by saying they didn't want players to be missing part of the whole experience of playing the game. We are the customers, please let us play the game how we want. Besides, as an Australian, only one of the three available server rental websites has Australian servers, so I don't even get a choice of which website to rent from. It's already crazy that I'm being forced to rent a server despite having the capacity to self-host, but the restrictions make it feel even worse. Besides, I guess you're also coerced into paying for the server for many months because once you stop playing you would likely lose your character and all of their progress.
The rented private servers also are missing a lot of the settings that made playing Conan Exiles so customizable and fun, instead there are only three settings that can be changed. In their last game it felt good to increase the amount of resources gathered so you could skip the grind if you wanted, and I had a lot of fun flying around and making bases in god mode, but it won't be possible to play the game the way you want anymore unless the devs take private servers more seriously. Apart from custom settings, mods were also a great part of making Conan Exiles fun, but if the devs never release the server files then it's likely that we'll never see any mods made for Dune Awakening, which would be a huge shame because mods significantly extend the lifespan of a game like this.
Devs, if you see this, please genuinely reconsider your choice to disallow self-hosted private servers. We don't mind how difficult it is to set up a clustered server, and we don't mind missing out on part of the experience of players in the city or PvP in the desert. We love your games and prefer when we can tinker with the settings to change reource rates and other things, and your dedicated community loves making mods and sharing them with everyone online. Please release the server files someday, hopefully sooner than later. Until then, I will begrudgingly rent a server from the only provider available just to enjoy your wonderful game by myself during the release hype, but I obviously can't reccomend that to anyone else.

I should probably preface this review with a few caveats. Obviously I am a huge Dune fan, notice the handle and profile picture, so there was literally zero chance I was not going to play this game. The flip side of this is that survival games are really not my jam and on top of that my experiences with Funcom have been resoundingly meh - Age of Conan had a great start on the island of Tortuga but dropped off steeply after that, and The Secret World just did not draw me in despite its promising premise. So I was interested to see how these two points were going to react with each other, the unstoppable force of fandom meeting the immovable object of mediocrity. I am pleased to report that this game succeeds in evoking the Dune Universe for me while at the same time providing me with a satisfying gameplay loop.
There is actually a plot which kind of surprises me, and they made the good decision to kick off with an alternate-universe Dune where Lady Jessica provides Leto with a daughter (like she was told to by the Bene Gesserit) rather than a son. The upshot of this decision is that Yueh failed to betray Leto and the battle of Arrakeen was fought to a standstill. Most of the Fremen are dead, killed by the Sardaukar, and the main plot has you looking for their remnants while you decide if you are going to pick sides in the ongoing war of the Atreides vs the Harkonnen. You start the game as a prisoner but your prison ship is destroyed by a mysterious benefactor and after your crash landing you have to scrabble for survival on Arrakis.
Funcom does a great job balancing the survival aspect of things with the combat/RPG aspect. You do have to kind of struggle to survive, especially early on in the game where finding water and staying hydrated is a real pain in the arse, especially if you are foolish enough to stay in the sun which will rapidly give you sunstroke. There are plenty of resources to harvest and the harvesting of those resources is made slightly more interesting by turning it into a mini-game where you have to laser a specific wiggly line in order to blow up the thing and turn it into goodies. A lot of stuff you have to get by killing bad guys and fortunately there are plenty of those as well in camps big and small, as well as some pretty long dungeon type areas filled with treasure and enemies. While it would seem on a desert planet that traveling/adventuring at night is the way to go, unfortunately patrol ships full of Sardaukar are looking for you at night and if they catch you it can be kind of scary as you get stuck in a tractor beam for a bit and then have to fight some professional troops. And of course if you are traveling across the sand you always run the risk of attracting a big sandworm who thinks of you as a tasty snack. It's all a lot of fun and the game gives you plenty to do, so much in fact that it's difficult to put the game down.
There is a leveling system - you gain xp every time you kill someone or harvest something (even if it's just picking something off the ground) and if you get enough to level up you acquire both research points (which govern what you can build) and skill points (which go into skill trees that you use to get bonuses to both combat and non-combat abilities as well as special powers). You pick a class to start the game but later on you can find trainers that will help you learn the skills of other classes so you don't feel too hemmed in. It feels good to level up and I read that the level cap is 200 so you don't have to worry about reaching it for a long time (I am 46 as of this writing). There is a button you can press to respec, but I have never pressed it.
The combat is surprisingly well done, balanced well between melee and ranged, shielded and unshielded. You get plenty of new combat abilities although you can only equip 2 active ones (there's a third slot, but it's been locked for me) and because of the existence of shielded enemies and their special powers it is actually fairly dynamic, much more so than I was expecting. It is naturally all in real time so get your reflexes ready. There is PvP in a few places - so far the only place I have found with PvP enabled was a crashed ship that had a bunch of resources in it that were otherwise pretty hard to get, but it turns out you can buy those resources at another outpost with enough solaris so even if you are not great at PvP you won't get locked out of certain items.
Characters move pretty well, you can dodge and jump and the trooper even has a starting ability that lets him hook people and things and then instantly pull himself close to whatever he hooked, which is obviously great for traversal. There are lots of items that let you jump, glide, and fall better, and you can climb by default. There are also vehicles you can build, and you probably should to try and get across those big stretches of desert without being eaten by a sandworm.
Dying is not normally that big of a deal - if you get downed you have a self-revive which can be pretty handy, and even if that fails you get to keep most of your equipment, all you lose are your solaris (money) which you can get back by running to where you died, Souls-style. The only exception to this is when you get eaten by a sandworm. If that happens to you, you will lose everything you had on you and it's gone forever. This happened to me once and I would be lying if I said it felt good, but on the other hand it does make sense that the gigantic sandworms would be the most fearsome things in the game and this is a good way of simulating that. In my explorations I found a blueprint for a rare pair of shoes that make it much less likely for you to attract a worm and you better believe I am wearing those all the time now.
Overall I have been very much enjoying the time I have spent on Arrakis and I am really fanboyishly happy to be playing a Mentat in one of my favorite franchises of all time. Funcom has been really hit or miss but I think they might have hit the sweet spot on this one. If you are a fan of Dune, survival games, or MMOs I would definitely check this out.