Dune: Awakening review – Three outstanding games in one, dripping with love for all things Dune.

Perilous are your first and millionth steps on the sands of Dune: Awakening, an unashamedly harsh game that throws you deep within the desert, along with nothing but a crafting kit and a vague mission: Find the Fremen, wake the Sleeper. What starts as a lonesome journey of scavenging scrap metal and sucking dew from planets gradually morphs into server-wide clashes over spice and fortune. It’s a survival game experience unlike any other I’ve played.

Dune: Awakening reviewPublisher: FuncomDeveloper: FuncomPlatform: Played on PC via SteamAvailability: Out now on PC.

The reason why is clear. Dune: Awakening isn’t one game but three, a psychedelic melting of genres. At first a full-fat survival game, thirty hours later it becomes an RPG rich with lore and political intrigue. Another thirty, and you’re in a Discord call collaborating with guilds on how best to fend off the Atreides and win the weekly Landsraad. Only now, having played through everything available, do I see the full picture.

Regardless of your progress, foundational survival gameplay is the connecting tissue that makes the whole thing work. Initially a standard offering, the process of gathering material around the starter area of Hagga Basin, refining your haul at your handcrafted base, and manufacturing new gear is made endlessly compelling with an unwavering faithfulness to the source material. The folks at Funcom are clearly freaks for Dune.

With wormaholics in charge, you quickly find that Dune isn’t just a coat of paint in Awakening, but a lattice tower the experience is built around. You need water, right? It’s a scarcity on Arrakis. You can harvest water from small plants with specialized tools, sure. But you can also build blood extractors that’ll pull fluids from the dead. Later on, hauling whole corpses back to base and dropping them in a Deathstill makes every battle a bounty.