It’s probably best to think of Dune: Awakening as a survival game first and an RPG second and I guess that makes a sort of sense. It makes sense not least because the arid and hostile desert world of Arrakis is such that survival should be your priority above everything else, right? I mean, it would be a bit odd if you’re prancing about chatting to folk, putting Harkonnen lads in the dirt (well, sand) and not having to worry about staying hydrated, avoiding heatstroke, maintaining a homely presence on those dusty sands or potentially becoming the hors d’oeuvres for the local sandworm.
And that multi-faceted approach is precisely what developer Funcom has pursued and largely succeeded in employing with Dune: Awakening, a wholly enjoyable hybrid that is part survival game, part MMO and part RPG with a generous enough dollop of polish to boot that even those uninitiated with Herbert’s legendary fiction will find much to enjoy.
Dune: Awakening PS5 Review
In terms of where Dune: Awakening sits in the great canon of Frank Herbert’s epic work, it actually doesn’t sit anywhere canonically at all, but instead exists as in a funky alternate universe where Paul Atreides is never born, Duke Leto survives his assassination, House Atreides endures and, perhaps most troublingly, the Fremen seemingly disappear without trace from the face of Arrakis – and it’s the latter mystery around which the entirety of Dune: Awakening’s unfurling narrative ultimately revolves around.
It’s against this narrative backdrop that you must fashion your own character to wander the desolate dunes (pun intended) of Arrakis, just as the War of Assassins, triggered in this alternate timeline by the foiling of Duke Leto’s assassination, threatens to drag every faction into the figurative furnace. Better yet, the whole scenario has been jointly constructed by both the Herbert estate and Legendary Pictures to ensure an extremely high level of authenticity exists in regards to both the page-turning and big-screen source materials.
On a broadly mechanical level, Dune: Awakening will certainly seem familiar to anyone that has spent any amount of time with Funcom’s previous attempt at this sort of thing, Conan Exiles. This is to say that there is a vast open world for you to explore filled with materials to be collected, enemies to kick in the shins and plenty of stuff for you to construct from weapons and armour, all the way through to your own sprawling domicile and means of transportation.
Where Dune: Awakening arguably far exceeds Conan Exiles however, is in how it satisfyingly intertwines these otherwise fairly dry crafting and exploratory requirements into a quest driven narrative that really makes you feel like you’re doing all of this crafting, base building and exploration for a reason, rather than just ticking off a bunch of banal objectives on the UI. Whether you’re gathering copper ore to build a desert bike, or tracking down the necessary components to construct an ornithopter to soar across Arrakis, it’s all tied up in a barrage of voiced dialogue and real-time cutscenes that make Dune: Awakening feel more akin to a full-blooded RPG than solely a survival crafting effort. If however, you’re the sort that lives and breathes for that kinda stuff, you can also choose to unlock all of the blueprints immediately at the beginning and get on with crafting your heart out. It’s nice to have a choice, after all.
Thankfully, there’s a lot of depth to the crafting and base building elements of Dune: Awakening – as you might expect from the studio which gave us Conan Exiles – which kept me plugging away for more than sixty hours and wrecking a portion of my social calendar in the process. While building your own base is an incredibly rewarding (and simple thanks to the super initiative construction UI), yet creatively inviting task, you must also ensure that it’s properly powered too, because failure to keep your base sufficiently juiced with fuel cells means that the violent sandstorms of Arrakis will tear at its walls, causing environmental decay until nothing remains. The same also applies to your vehicles, in that if you leave them unprotected and out in the open, they too will be degraded, bit by bit, by the vicious Arrakian weather until they become completely unusable. I actually really like this mechanic because it makes you invested in the world and provides your dwellings and belongings with a feeling of permanence that can only be sustained by you actually logging into the game and taking care of it.
It also doesn’t hurt that Dune: Awakening puts its foot forward much more like a traditional RPG than a survival-crafty thing, too. Kicking off with the sort of bombast laden introduction that wouldn’t be out of place in Denis Villeneuve’s excellent Dune movie trilogy, you must create your character, defining a faction/house that you belong to, in addition to your social rank and class and then it’s off to the races as you find yourself shot down on Arrakis and struggling for your life as you attempt to pull yourself out of a deep cavern and into the world.
It’s also at the very beginning of Dune: Awakening that I quickly realised that the partnership between developer Funcom and Legendary Pictures extends far beyond just the setting, as Dune: Awakening is absolutely steeped in the restlessly stylish visual language of Denis Villeneuve’s big-screen Dune trilogy. From the architectural brutalism of its buildings, to the epic desolation of the Arrakis desert at large where sand drifts playfully skip off the edge of cliffs and the various dunes scattered around the world, Dune: Awakening absolutely looks the part. Additionally. An ever present Heighliner, those gargantuan cylindrical star ships from the book and movies, also sits threateningly in the sky, while Sardukar ships scout the arid sands for signs of rebellion. Clearly then, Funcom have created an evocative representation of Arrakis that is absolutely in aesthetic lockstep with the new movies and I’m totally here for it.
Not everything is spice and rainbows however when it comes to the visual presentation of Dune: Awakening from a technical standpoint. The character models, while fine in cutscenes and in movement overall, lack the fine detail one might expect with completely rigid hair which just sits in place no matter what and fairly basic lighting over the character skin in general. PS5 Pro users also aren’t clearly catered for either because while there are the usual performance and quality modes work well enough in the ways that you would expect (the former offering up 60 FPS at a lower resolution and the latter providing half that at a higher resolution), there’s no mention of PSSR or any other special visual toggles for owners of Sony’s current-gen professional console.
Of course beyond just crafting and building all manner of things in Dune: Awakening, it’s the survival aspect of Funcom’s latest offering that is arguably the more important side of that particular coin. Hazards are everywhere and death by giant sandworm however, *is* the absolute worst, because not only do you die but you lose everything you have on your person at that time – and if you happen to have your base reconstructor on you with your base backed up to it then, well, you’re properly stuffed mate. Maybe don’t muck around with miles-long sandworms in the future, eh?
There’s a real dynamic spectacle to those things too. You really do feel the rumble through the DualSense when these massive worms travel underground, and then when they break through the sand and into the air, the sound of their titanic emergence is almost deafening (and especially if you happen to be adorned with a decent PS5 headset). It’s great stuff and properly underscores them as the epic, all-encompassing threat that they are supposed to be.
Other dangers to your general wellbeing also abound throughout Arrakis and perhaps none is more insidious than simply staying hydrated. As it is in both the books and the movies, water is key to survival on Arrakis, and without it you will die, while staying out in the sun for an extended period of time will result in sunstroke, draining your precious water reserves yet faster still. Luckily, there are a number of ways and means of securing the blue stuff.
Should you find yourself absolutely gasping for some water, there is a species of special water absorbing plants dotted around Arrakis that you can extract a small amount of water from in a pinch. You can even steal processed water from the hideouts and camps of the various outlaws and hostile factions that operate on Arrakis, though such collections shouldn’t be relied upon.
For the most part, you’ll be self-reliant on yourself to ensure that you have ample water supplies and this can be achieved primarily by first crafting a blood extraction tool, draining the corpses of your enemies dry and then recycling the blood at your blood refinery to get at the precious H2O which lay within. It made me feel like some kind of desert vampire and you know what, I don’t hate it.
Something else I don’t hate in Dune: Awakening is the exploration. In any other game vast expanses of seemingly empty desert would seem like death for an open-world RPG like this, but Dune: Awakening knows its setting and it knows how to make those expanses entice, rather than repel, thanks to abundance of caves, hidden installation and rocky outcroppings. In fact, Dune: Awakening offers up a surprising amount of freedom for folks that like to do their traversal by foot, because while you can run to pretty much any place you want (working your way from rock to rock to avoid the sandworm, obviously), you can also pretty much scale any surface you like, allowing you to climb up the side of cliffs and other such sheer walls in a fashion that would make Ezio Auditore blush – though you are limited by a desperately finite stamina meter when you do this.
Further afield, travelling at speed across or above the sands of Arrakis by either by bike or by ornithopter is something of an evergreen thrill, not least because allows you to marvel at the great work Funcom has put into making Arrakis look and feel like a truly living and breathing counterpart to the world described in Herbert’s books and in Villeneuve’s movies.
When you’re not crafting, building, exploring and pushing forward with the various main story missions and side missions, you’ll be putting your foot into the bums of your enemies and it’s here that Dune: Awakening can feel a little uneven. Ranged combat is a bit dull and uninspired early on, as there is no real system in place which allows you to stick to nearby cover and the AI of your enemies is deeply questionable in that they’ll either stay at range occasionally pot-shotting you if they have a ranged weapon, or, they’ll come charging toward you waving some variation of a sword or dagger around. Where combat gets a little more tricky and this is something which directly dovetails into the lore of Dune, is that the personal shields which your enemies (and later you) employ can only be penetrated by a slow blade and not by ranged fire. This essentially means that combat in Dune: Awakening frequently and often furiously oscillates between tense ranged stand-offs and frantic melee encounters.
On the topic of encounters, though Dune: Awakening can be played with other players that you can work with, or against, and around which much of the endgame currently centers itself around, you can tackle almost the entirety of Dune: Awakening in single-player and you’ll never get bothered by another player. This is an important point because though the endgame of Dune: Awakening in its current form is extremely PvP focused, you can still put potentially hundreds of hours into the game just as a single-player offering and easily get a great bang for buck ratio as a result.
I had so much more fun with Dune: Awakening than I thought I was going to have. Principally, while I don’t mind the survival elements in games like this, it’s how developer Funcom has essentially weaponised its RPG elements to provide a connective tissue of sorts between its survival mechanics that actually make you want to do these survival tasks. It’s also true that you don’t even necessarily need to be a fan of the source material to get stuck into Dune: Awakening, such is the effectiveness of its storytelling beats and quest system, though obviously you’ll get more from the game at large if you are.
Dune: Awakening looks like Dune, sounds like Dune and for all intents and purposes feels just like a game based on Dune should. Dune: Awakening is also clearly illustrative of the fact that Funcom has come a long way since the release of Conan Exiles and while the production values might not be quite so high as some might like, this is nonetheless the most vivid depiction of Arrakis and the tapestry of human tragedy that defined Frank Herbert’s novellas to date in video game form. Dune: Awakening is an easy recommendation for Dune fans, survival fans and the folks within the Venn diagram which define the overlap of those two interests.
Dune: Awakening will release for PS5 on September 22, 2026.
Review code kindly provided by PR.