Dune: Awakening (PS5) Review – A World Revitalized

Dune: Awakening (PS5) Review

A console port can be a chance for a fresh start. A clean slate to fix some of a game’s most nagging problems. Dune: Awakening used the jump from PC to console to make some big changes. There’s a whole stack of new features and new modes that have made things better. But there are also some issues that stuck around from one version to the other. Overall, this feels like a marked improvement from the game players were first introduced to last year.

The biggest change is probably the single-player campaign. Now instead of whipping up a private server, you can play solo through a newly completed story. Book One is finally done, and the single-player mode lets you run through all of it in relative peace. As a habitual loner, I’m a big fan of solo campaigns. So naturally this is where I did all my playing. It’s nice to know no one is going to come in and mess with your stuff while your away, but you can take things even further than that.

Going Solo Actually Viable

There’s a giant list of settings you can mess around with. Sandworms, storms, enemy behavior, mining rates, and more can all be tweaked to your preference. This was a real boon, as Dune: Awakening is downright brutal with all the defaults left in place. You’re running out of water more or less constantly, even with a stillsuit equipped. The sandstorms shave your life away in seconds, and combat is still pretty unpleasant. This is one of the major changes I was hoping for that never materialized.

You can read our original review here. While I agree that battles feel like a giant drag, I sort of understand why. Since this is a survival game first and foremost, the game is invested in you feeling overwhelmed as much as possible. We’re not trading in power fantasies here, at least not at first. And yes, this makes sense from a design perspective. But it still feels bad. You need a stack of darts to take most people down, and even the slow knife takes forever to penetrate the shield, so to speak. Worse, death means you’re hoofing it across a lot of desert to retrieve your corpse. That is, unless you’re constantly dropping new spawn points. Which you can totally do! It’s just exhausting that you need to do so to make progression less grueling.

Fights Still Fairly Brutal

Anytime you manage to make any progress at all it feels like a massive victory. This is another survival game special. You’re trading pain and suffering for the sublime taste of success. Messing with the levers behind the scenes means you can achieve your victories with less pain, but you don’t feel quite as accomplished when you do. Of course, the main multiplayer experience still preserves this cruel yet delicate balance.

Dune: Awakening has some incredible atmosphere. The cutscenes, the visuals, and the overall vibes are all excellent. You can see this huge ship in the sky above you, so big and so distant that it fades into the air. There’s a huge, complex universe revealed through history and backstory. Everything feels drenched in plot. So it feels weird to shake off all this incredible narrative potential whenever possible. All that awesome lore is violently cast aside so you can spend countless hours scrambling around the desert getting shot or stabbed by bandits. The setting and the gameplay loop are constantly at war with one another.

Setting The Setting Aside

Which isn’t totally fair. Survival games are cool, okay? Building a base, expanding a tech tree, scavenging parts, and getting more dangerous are all fun activities. But they’re also part of a genre that asks players to create their own stories. Dune is a world of dense, complex plots that are a joy to unravel and follow to their exciting conclusions. It feels like a strange match, is what I’m saying.

There’s a lot more to unpack in terms of new content for the console release. You’ve got the new augmentation and specialization system, a revamped endgame, and new levels throughout the campaign. The devs also put in some real labor to ensure that solo players are able to actually finish the game, which is rad. Plus, a whole list of quality-of-life fixes were made to keep you from losing your precious possessions so often. Reading through the list is astonishing. Players used to get charged taxes for base upkeep! For some reason! returning players can check here to see the whole list of changes; there are frankly too many to list.

Console ports are a great chance to shake things up. Dune: Awakening takes full advantage of this, with a gigantic list of changes. While the combat is still pretty brutal, and the gameplay sits strangely in the setting, this is a whole new Arrakis. Old fans who’ve seen it all and new players alike will absolutely want to check out this new version of the game. This is a bigger, better version of Funcom’s massive survival RPG, one that can’t be missed.

***A PS5 code was provided by the publisher***