Dune: Awakening Review ([TAG]Alblaka)
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.