Dune Awakening PC Review
Summary: Explore the world of Arrakis also known as Dune! Avoid the worm and keep hydrated!
4.8
Discover Dune
The world of Dune Awakening is vast. Vast! From the epic cinematic opening to taking your first steps, it’s clear a lot of thought and time has gone into building this online world. Though you start as a mere survivor, aided by your saviour, you will grow in strength and build your own fortress to control your own slice of Arrakis!
That saviour I mentioned acts as a great tutorial and exposition tool, giving you a quick overview of where you are and how to get started. He pops up as you progress, leading you towards other tasks and achievements. But after the very beginning, a very delicate time, you can essentially just go off on your own, and that’s when you really find out just how big this world is.
The map is divided into sections that need to be explored and ideally surveyed to really uncover just what is out there waiting for you. You will come across fortresses of the great houses, fight against or for slavers, and generally start making your presence felt. The story, which you can either follow or leave to the side, sees you searching for any trace of the Fremen who are believed by many to have been completely wiped out.
As much as it is fun to explore, it’s also nice to be able to come back to a story or even missions to break up the resource gathering for a while. On the topic of resource gathering, it’s going to require a lot of travel. The area you start off in will provide you with some basic materials, ores, and so on. But when you are led to the next area, you find out there are even more resources, and as you progress from there, yet more resources still. This can become a little frustrating if you haven’t placed your limited bases in optimal positions. Ideally, you would have them either near a taxi service or some other way of moving from one area of the map to another reasonably quickly, keeping in mind the open dunes bring a risk of sand worm or even quicksand. The trick is, resources on one side of the map might be needed to produce the equipment required to utilise resources on the other side of the map. It’s a tricky balance, but once you get a feel for where things are, it gets a little easier. Plus, you can use a trike early on to move about, and eventually you can even get your own ornithopter.
But things aren’t all smooth sailing. I have encountered a few bugs and glitches. The most common and perhaps most annoying is when trying to climb walls, typically more frequent when trying to climb over jutting out pieces of rock, but sometimes your avatar will seem to start doing a little dance in place on the rock and turn around and be climbing on thin air.
This is all well and good and might not be super annoying if not for the fact that climbing requires stamina. You will run out, and if you have made it a long way up a cliff and don’t have a suspensor belt, that loss of stamina and subsequent drop will at best ruin your progress and at worst kill you, or rather, cause you to need to revive. So it’s not that bad, but still. Occasionally, display items remain when they shouldn’t, such as grenade threat indicator warnings. A more common issue appears when using the vehicle store device. If you switch to some other item, it will sometimes still have the outline of where you want to place the vehicle. My worst glitch, though, was respawning and then falling through the map. I mean, I got to watch a worm from that perspective, which meant I got to see the whole thing, so that was kind of cool, but the subsequent loss of condition on my tools was not appreciated.
Final Thoughts?
If you are a fan of Dune, there’s a lot here to enjoy, the interplay between houses, the war of assassins, and of course the fear of being pursued by a worm and only just escaping, or perhaps not escaping. Despite the glitches, I have still found myself returning time and time again, and though some tasks can be frustrating or repetitive, it’s such a beautifully realised world that I don’t really mind. Even when I shut it down to take a break for a while, inevitably I will be firing it up again before long to see just how much further I can get, or what I can manage to get the resources together to build next. I’m so close to being able to build my ornithopter. Definitely jump in and explore!
About the Author
Chris O'Connor Father of four, husband of one and all round oddity. Gaming at home since about 1982 with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Moving on to the more traditional PC genre in the years that followed with the classic Jump Joe and Alley Cat. CGA, EGA, VGA and beyond PC's have been central to my gaming but I've also enjoyed consoles and hand helds along the way (who remembers the Atari Lynx?). Would have been actor/film maker, jack of many trades master of none.
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