‘Dune Awakening’ Finally Gets Dune’s Epic Scale Right

It sucks to be on Arrakis. It’s sweltering and unforgiving sun stifles surface life. Its apex predator makes the simple act of moving across its barren landscapes oppressive. Its sand is coarse and rough and irritating and gets everywhere. This is the primary detail Frank Herbert drives home in the first book of his sci-fi epic, and it permeates and influences nearly every hero and villain that sets foot on the planet.

TV and film adaptations do a decent job of explaining this to audiences through action and dialogue. But in Funcom’s new MMORPG, Dune Awakening, this fact translates better than any of the adaptations to come before it. I’m only about 10 hours into the game, and dealing with the desert is my absolute favorite part of what’s on offer here. I’m not alone in that; the developer has announced that Awakening reached over a million players in just two weeks.

“It’s now Funcom’s fastest-selling game ever,” the developer wrote in a Steam blog post. “To put it into perspective, it took Conan Exiles [the developer’s last game] one year to reach this number. We’re truly humbled and thankful for this reception.”

Dune Awakening smashes together a ton of successful ideas from other popular games. It’s got the crafting, base building, and resource management of games like Sons Of The Forest and Minecraft. It has the action-oriented persistent online world of a Destiny or The Division, and the ever-present terrors of Left 4 Dead. The result is a survival game with a strong and addictive loop. It doesn’t exactly break these well-established molds, but the fact that Awakening is all filtered through the lens of the increasingly popular Dune universe adds just the right amount of novelty from the very start.

Hastily running from shadow to shadow to reduce sun exposure is a fun spin on the otherwise tedious act of walking across wide expanses of desert. The constant drain on your hydration levels is surprisingly fun to manage. Awakening makes every resource you collect on Arrakis feel earned, as you have to do it before the planet beats you into submission. Scrounging limited moisture from the dew of plant life feels like stumbling onto gold, while sandstorms keep you on the move and make shelters feel like the sanctuaries they should be.

Then, of course, there’s the sandworms. These colossal stalkers act as enforcers, keeping players on their toes when they’re getting too greedy with resources. Funcom talked a big game about how well they captured the terror of the sandworms, and now that I’ve experienced having one on my tail while my pockets are full of precious goods, I can confirm that their confidence was well-founded. The worms are equalizers that players, regardless of level, must bow to.

Simply put, surviving on Arrakis is just as arduous as it’s explained in the book, and experiencing that is a unique thrill. I’m still in the first stages of my journey, but Awakening has done a tremendous job of getting me acquainted with its premise. I’m not the biggest fan of the survival genre, but this is the most I’ve been impressed with such a game in a long time, and Funcom deserved a ton of credit for living up to the high standards of its source material.

Dune: Awakening is available on PC.