Is Dune: Awakening a Good SURVIVAL Game?

Gideon’s Perspective

Dune Awakening is a game that in my mind should serve as an example of what a survival game should be. We are talking about Arrakis here, an exceptionally harsh desert planet. A planet where its inhabitants wear a suit that recycles their own sweat and urine for water, and where one of few living creatures are gigantic sand worms that hunt through vibration.

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The very concept of even existing in a Dune game should be a trial of will and perseverance. Does Dune Awakening deliver on this fantasy? That’s what I’m going to explore. I have 6 core criteria for a survival game. The General Gameplay, Resource Engagement, Base Engagement, World Threat, Overall Challenge and Long-Term Loop. I’ll be grading Dune Awakening on each of these factors from F to A, F being the lowest grade possible, and A being the best.

A word of warning. This is my own personal criteria from my own perspective, and I’ve never encountered a survival game that earned straight As in every category. With that said. Let’s get started.

General Gameplay

The act of controlling your character in Dune Awakening feels pretty unique, mostly because it does a really good job of capturing the quirks of the setting. The most prominent example is going to be Holtzman Shields.

Both you and enemy NPCs can utilize these shields and they completely block damage from fast attacks, such as projectiles and swift melee attacks. While the power pack supporting them can be drained if the shield absorbs a bunch of gunfire, that’s not truly viable most of the time.

Instead, you will utilize special weapons to help bypass the shields or by engaging them in melee. Fast Melee attacks are also blocked by the shield, but you can stagger an enemy to slip in slower heavy melee attacks to penetrate the shield.

The visuals and sound effects that go into this are very satisfying as an enemies’ shield turn red and vibrate as you break through, the game really sells this particular aspect of Dune. The melee combat is simple, with fast attacks, slow attacks, a parry and dodge, but feels really good, especially when combined with class abilities such as a Blade Master’s knee strike or a Bene Gesserit’s teleport.

The shooting also feels snappy, and impactful. Certain weapons can stagger enemies and head shot kills make a satisfying crack. A few ranged weapons can bypass shields in some way, such as drill shots that drill through the shield, and much like heavy melee attacks, this is conveyed to the player with satisfying visual effects such as pinpoints on the shield turning red as the drill makes buzzing sounds as it breaks through.

Moving around the world of Arrakis is also highly enjoyable. Dune Awakening inherits the climb anywhere feature from Funcoms own Conan Exiles but is further amplified by lore accurate aspects of Dune. You will eventually drive around Sand bikes, Buggy’s and fly Ornithopters, but you can also utilize suspensors which carry your momentum. This can be combined with things such as the Troopers Shiga wire grapple to propel yourself vast heights and distances.

Like the aforementioned Shiga wire, each of the classes in Dune Awakening adds a nice variety of combat and exploration tools. For example, the Bene Gesserit can utilize the Bindu Sprint to bolt around on foot at high speeds. Blademasters get a variety of melee combat attacks, while the Mentat can utilize turrets and energy barriers.

You aren’t limited by your starting class either, you can find trainers in the world that have quest lines that unlock other classes for you, allowing you to mix and match. But this is also where Dune Awakening starts to show some of its weakness. Your choices are rarely meaningful, as you can eventually access everything and well, some choices don’t feel all that balanced.

For example, I chose Trooper as my starting class. It’s a class focused on ranged weapons. That turned out to be a frustrating mistake. You meet the Trooper trainer within the first couple hours of playing, other class trainers are farther off. My friends who I was playing with had access to my class very early, while I was nowhere near accessing theirs. It felt bad.

Furthermore, while ranged combat feels good, it also feels outclassed by melee altogether due to the Holtzman Shields. Not all enemies have a shield, but every outpost in the game is bound to have some of them, and it becomes a question of efficiency with a very clear answer. You see, you will also have a Holtzman shield for 90% of the game. Holtzman shields temporarily shut off when you fire a gun. It put me as a Trooper in a strange position. Shooting exposed myself. My gun could kill unshielded enemies, but I would struggle with shielded ones who charged me. Even if I had ranged weapons that could bypass shields, they wouldn’t do it fast enough before I’d get staggered and stabbed. So, I’d switch to melee for those enemies, that’s fine. But I had a realization.

I already needed to use melee weapons against shielded melee enemies who could hurt me. But, if I just kept using melee, the ranged unshielded enemies couldn’t hurt me through my Holtzman Shield unless I got overwhelmed. It made more sense for me to just charge and stab them too as firing my gun would shut down my shield so I could be shot. But they could do little against me running up to them with a knife, just as I could do little to the enemies who did it to me when I was using guns.

It’s weird. Despite choosing Trooper and building around ranged weapons, I default to a sword most of the time. To be fair, that is very lore accurate, the widespread use of Holtzman shields made firearms obsolete in Dune. But it doesn’t make for interesting gameplay. Heck, the Blade Master has a super cool ability where they can use stamina to deflect gunfire with a sword. But why would I EVER need to use that when I have a Holtzman shield for 90% of the game? I feel like Holtzman shields needed more of a drawback.

To make matters worse, Dune Awakening at one point had a strong PvP centric design that has since been axed so hard that it barely exists at all. All PvP is an optional endgame activity. The problem is that it really shows that the game wasn’t designed to be pure PvE from the ground up. Enemy variety is lacking and repetitive. You fight the same enemies at hour 80 as you did at hour 5, they just deal more damage and have more health or stronger shields. Arrakis has no monsters or wildlife to fight. Sand mice exist and so do the sand worms, but you aren’t engaging in combat against either one. There are no enemy Ornithopters or Buggies to fight, I have a Rocket Launcher but nothing to use it on.

I’m giving the gameplay a C. Moving around the world is fun and the combat is solid with some lore accurate mechanics that make it stand out. But it also feels pretty unbalanced and repetitive with little in the way of enemy variety.

PvP is hard to get right in a survival game, and plenty do it wrong. But I’m not sure Arrakis is a great setting for a PvE focused game because beyond the sand, sun and worms, there isn’t much to it.

World Threat

My first hour with Dune filled me with a lot of hope. At first, it felt harsh, as it should. I was sprinting from landmass to landmass like I was in the old Tremors movies as walking over open sand attracts the worms. I had to stick to shade as the sun was overbearing and I could only quench my thirst on the dew of flowers. I tried to travel by night, when the suns scorching rays couldn’t harm me and i clung to shadows during the day. By following the starting tutorial quests, I was able to craft my first Stillsuit, which would slowly turn my bodily fluids into water, but even that was just a band aid.

Then came hour two and three, and I never worried about water again, not really. You see, for awhile Dune Awakening becomes a vampire game. You build a blood purifier, extract blood from your slain victims and then purify it into water. Then you can carry that water in literjons, and the process only gets more streamlined as you play. You will at some point, have a base with thousands of liters of water that you use to craft and carry an insane amount of it on you.

You can wear a Stillsuit or Armor, but not both, and after the early hours I went with armor and never looked back. What should have been a choice with consequences didn’t matter, because water was never an issue. That’s…absurd. I was very disappointed at how quickly surviving Arrakis became trivial and how fast I stopped caring about the sun or drinking my own pee.

Then there’s the other threat on Arrakis, the worms. The early hours were exhilarating. I chose my paths carefully and planned my routes to take the shortest path between landmasses. Walking or doing anything on the sand makes noise that attracts the worm. If the worm catches and eats you, you lose all of the gear you had on you, which makes the worms an ever-present threat.

At least, I thought. Then I figured out that the worm gives you three whole business days to dance on the sand and when it finally shows up it gives you ample time to scurry away. I figured out I could run pretty much any length of the starting zone, and the worm would never catch me unless I let it. The worm does move faster beyond the starting zone but not enough to really pose a real threat. If you are in a vehicle, and you will be most of the time, you have plenty of time to escape. I’ve only died to worm once, and I was intentionally drawing it out.

The Worm, is for all intents and purposes, a fake threat. You can die to it if you are being intentionally reckless, or if your controller dies while you’re in the middle of the sand. But it isn’t the omnipresent threat it should be. You really don’t have to plan around it, and that’s a shame because it’s the only real threat on Arrakis. At night a few ships patrol around with a spotlight and will drop troops on you. But there are no other wandering enemies. Enemies are in set outposts and camps around the map, there’s no threat beyond the worm unless you seek them out.

For World Threat I’m giving Dune Awakening an F. I’ve died less in Dune Awakening than any other survival game when I feel like Arrakis should be one of the harshest settings possible in a survival game. Scorched Earth from Ark Survival Evolved does it better, heck even Conan Exiles does it better. That’s incredibly disappointing.

Resource Engagement

I have a somewhat controversial stance that while resource gathering is a central part of Survival games, it alone, is not gameplay. There has to be something connected to it, usually danger to make it engaging. Dune Awakening is a mixed bag here. As I mentioned before, there is no danger outside of set outposts. So anytime you are out mining copper or iron or whatever type of ore you aren’t really…playing a game. You’re just pushing a button, watching numbers go up, moving to the next ore node, repeat.

It’s weird. Since there is no danger in the world, you can move to pretty much any zone as early as you want. If you grab just enough materials to make a cutter ray capable of gathering the ore you want, you can pretty much skip entire tiers of tech. So, suffice it to say Dune Awakening handles this aspect pretty badly, but not entirely.

Gathering ores, and scrap isn’t engaging, but the game locks a lot of specific materials in various outposts, testing labs and wrecks throughout the world. You have to actually go in and fight enemies to obtain those materials, so you are forced into danger to obtain them. That’s far more interesting. Gathering flour sand or Spice also requires you to enter open sands and make noise that will attract the worm. I may not be happy with how slow the worm is to actually kill you, but even that is more interesting than lasering rocks for hours.

For Resource Engagement, I’m giving Dune Awakening a C. It’s a shame that there is no threat in the world so mining thousands of ore is just a time sink that lacks engagement. But it does force you into dungeons, outposts and the open sands to acquire specific materials which makes the process of acquiring those materials actually engaging to play.

Base Engagement

Despite being a resource grind, many survival games treat bases as cosmetics rather than a core part of your survival. What I mean is, you can usually just build crafting stations on a few foundations in the open and never bother with walls, or an actual base and nothing would change,. You can’t do that in Dune Awakening, but just barely.

The base building in Dune Awakening is quite intuitive and fun to play with, you can make all kind of cool looking bases. On the server I’m on, I even came across a super cool castle. The problem is, this is a survival game, it’s fine for a base to look cool, but that shouldn’t be the only reason it exists. It should exist to protect you, and your stuff. Enemies or other threats should attack it. Nothing comes to attack your base in Dune Awakening, unless you’re silly enough to build on Open Sand, like I did early on, in which case the worm will very quickly evict you.

The vast majority of bases you will come across are bland boxes, because there is no mechanical incentive to delve into a resource grind required to make anything else. Your base is almost purely cosmetic, because it will face no outside threat at all. I feel like Dune Awakening has all the source material to have a type of raid mechanic where you would need to protect your base from Slavers, Scavengers, Sardukar, whatever. Even Funcom’s own Conan Exiles had a type of PvE raid mechanic. It’s a shame that Dune Awakening lacks one.

I’m giving Dune Awakening an E for Base Engagement. It avoids the F because you actually do need walls and ceilings to protect your crafting stations from sandstorms. I also really like the base blueprint and back up tool that makes moving your base around really intuitive. But ultimately your bases still largely have no game mechanics beyond how it looks.

Overall Challenge

We have already established that Dune Awakening scored very poorly in the World Threat Category. So how does it stack up with its Overall Challenge. I should note that most of my play time comes from playing on a public server with its default settings. I did some testing in single player with some settings tweaked, but they largely didn’t make a difference, you will understand why in a moment.

The actual combat can be challenging. Enemies can be dangerous, especially in groups and it tries to give you incentive to fight intelligently to at least some degree. That said, almost every encounter in the game does not feel like it was made with multiplayer in mind. Anytime me and some friends walked into an outpost or dungeon together, it was a slaughter fest as we wrecked everything.

Fighting alone was indeed fun, until I died for the first time and the games entire facade collapsed around me. When you are reduced to 0 hit points in Dune Awakening. You start crawling and can then self-revive yourself as long as you are hydrated, it consumes such a small amount of hydration that the visual water indicator on the HUD barely moves. You would consume more by standing in the sun for 10 seconds.

As I mentioned before you can carry absurd amounts of water on you, you’re always hydrated. You can continually self revive, not quite infinitely, but close. This is functionally the same as having infinite health. What, the, fuck, are, we, doing?! What kind of baby ass baby catering bullshit is this? You’re almost invincible in a Survival game? A DUNE survival game? This mechanic needs to be gone, yesterday. For all the shit Wolverine got with it’s fart trails, Dune Awakening, and any other game that does this should face just as much backlash, if not more.

But wait, that’s not all. What if you for whatever reason, aren’t hydrated or the enemies manage to finish you off before you self revive? It’s rare but can happen. You drop a handful of things from your inventory, which you can just pick right back up as you can spawn on your vehicle that you most likely used to arrive with. And get this. The durability of your gear decreases by, you might want to sit down for this. 2 whole percent! Down from 5% because that was apparently too punishing!

This is a fake ass video game. There are no stakes, the stakes are completely fake, it’s an illusion. This is some of the most dumbed down crap I’ve seen in a while. Get it the hell out of here. Overall Challenge is an F, an F for fuck right off with that goo-goo ga-ga crap.

Long Term Loop

Ahem. Now that I’ve slightly regained my composure, let’s talk about Dune Awakenings long term loop. Like most survival games, you gather resources to make new gear to gather new resources to make new gear. You start off with improvised weapons and scrap clothing and move to full armor, fancy guns and whole vehicles. The main problem is, nothing really feels like it changes in Dune Awakening, except for when you get an Orinithopter for the first time. Flying is super cool, but you also bypass what little threat the game had in the form of the sandworms.

Dune Awakenings lack of enemy variety means you get better weapons, to fight the same dudes that are just stronger, to get better weapons, to fight the same dudes again that are just stronger, repeat. That way you can eventually progress into end game dungeons to, shocker, fight the same dudes who are just stronger. (And none of it matters because death has no fucking stakes)

However, Dune Awakening also features a ton of NPCs with full questlines and a full main quest. The story is actually interesting, but I feel like a survival game is a terrible vehicle to tell a direct story through. And here is where the illusion fades entirely. We have HUBs full of NPCs that require you to continually come back to them. Entire shops, a bank and even a player auction house. There is a full main quest that even gives you gear equal to high tier stuff. Enemies who only spawn in very specific locations and dungeons. Other players that exist but don’t impact your experience at all beyond a world chat room and death has no stakes

Funcom you bastards you tricked me. I’ve been duped, I’ve been had. This is an outrage! Dune Awakening isn’t a survival game, it’s an MMORPG. I’ve been tricked into playing an MMO that looks like a survival game, the only thing missing is giant yellow exclamation points above the heads of quest givers. What a way to start this survival game grading series, with a survival game that’s not even a survival game at all.

As I tried to push through, I kept having the same thought. Why am I doing this? I’m setting up this new resource base to gather that resource easier so I can make these new weapons, but for what. To go fight the same style NPCs that I’ve been fighting all game, but with higher stats? Maybe if eventual PvP had been the goal, I’d have the motivation. But it’s been so thoroughly gutted it may as well not exist. Dune Awakening gets an F in the Long-Term Loop Category.

Overall Grade

By my criteria Dune Awakening fails as a survival game in almost every measurable way. Mostly because it’s not really a survival game at all. It’s a quest focused MMO in every way that matters. But beyond that, Dune Awakening’s complete lack of stakes makes it fail as a video game altogether

I simply cannot enjoy a game that more or less has what would amount to a God Mode cheat programmed in by default. This isn’t a matter of different difficulties appealing to different people. But a lack of one at all. It’s a game that only pretends to place any type of opposition in front of you. Dune Awakening is far from the only game to do this, and I don’t understand how any of them aren’t roasted over the flames for it. But it may be the first game that I’ve played that CLAIMS to be a survival game to do it so blatantly.

Overall, Dune Awakening gets an F. It fails as a survival game for me in almost every capacity and I think it’s actually a pretty bad game altogether. That sucks because I really like the Dune Universe