In 2026, I still judge survival games by whether they can make my pulse jump when I am only holding down a space bar. Dune: Awakening does exactly that. I am standing in the deep sand, scooping up clumps of spice, when a sandworm erupts a few meters away. I know the worm is coming, but not this fast and not this close. I yell, leap into my ornithopter, and watch my screen fill with a mouth like a subway tunnel. I know I am at my desk, but in my head I am pulling the control stick with both hands. If that worm swallows me, I lose my 'thopter, my spice, my gear, and even my pockets. I respawn in my underwear and have to re-craft armor, weapons, tools, and vehicle. Fear is the mind-killer; a sandworm is the gear-killer. I escape with just enough altitude, then sit still for a moment while my heart settles. That is Dune: Awakening in one scene.
Funcom's survival MMO is several games wearing one stillsuit. It is a PvE sandbox I can play alone, a co-op survival game I can conquer with friends, and a cutthroat PvP extraction game that did not even enter my life until roughly 80 hours in. Some of it is rough, and some of it is grindy in ways that test my patience, but the parts that work are strong enough to keep me coming back to Arrakis. 🏜️
| Detail | My take |
|---|---|
| Price | $49.99 / £41.99 |
| Developer and publisher | Funcom |
| Multiplayer | Yes |
| Steam Deck | Playable |
| My setup | Intel i7 9700K, RTX 4070 Ti, 16GB RAM |
The Desert Makes Me Feel Small
The opening hours do what every good survival game should do: they make me feel fragile, weak, and desperate. This is an alt-history Arrakis, with House Atreides and the Harkonnens locked in a long civil war, and the desert is littered with spaceship wreckage I can harvest for crafting. In the early game, my only water comes from licking dew off scattered plants. The sun is so scalding that I creep between shadows, and at night Sardaukar ships patrol the sky and send down heavily armed assassins if I am spotted. 😅
It does not stay that way forever. Within a few hours I have tools for my first base and even a vehicle to brave the dunes and the sandworms beneath them. That is when Dune: Awakening starts to feel less like a punishment and more like a life I am carving out on an inhospitable planet.
Water, Blood, and the Grind
The survival loop can get grindy. There is an early stage where the most reliable source of water is blood, and I found myself making joyless blood runs through the same handful of NPC caves and camps. One NPC lived about 10 meters from my front door, and I must have killed and drank that poor man a few dozen times. Later, more elegant options appear, like tools that harvest dew from plants and windtraps that capture moisture from the air. Crafting gets more complex and demands shocking amounts of water, so even later I sometimes cosplay a desert vampire and collect a few extra liters of blood.
Stockpiling other resources in the mid-to-late game can grow monotonous. Some materials only appear as loot in certain NPC strongholds and only in small amounts, which means raiding the same locations again and again. I do not love that loop. But there is another kind of grind I genuinely enjoy. I love hopping into a buggy and driving out for a resource run, using a mining laser on boulders in the mountains or crystals in murky ravines. I am always happy to fly my 'thopter out to the dunes for flour sand, dodging angry sandworms every few minutes. 🪱
When the survival systems do not rely solely on killing the same NPCs over and over, an enjoyable routine emerges. I patch up degraded gear, spot weld vehicle components, and repair what I can. These rituals make me feel less like a murderer and more like someone trying to make a home on Arrakis. #desertlife
Dune Tech Feels Great to Craft
Progression is not only about better weapons and gear. It is about feeling more connected to the Dune universe. I get a little buzz every time I advance enough to craft something from the fiction. I remember the scene in Villeneuve's first Dune film where Duke Leto is shot in the back. His shield stops fast blades and projectiles, but a slow dart burrows through until it incapacitates him. I have a gun that does that now, called a drillshot, and it is sick. The hovering dart turns the blue shield red as it burrows through to find the vulnerable body of whatever unlucky NPC I have shot. I also have Fremen deathstills at my guild's base, and we can stick bodies in them to convert them into water. It is gross to watch corpses gently liquify into drinking water, but it is also pretty darn cool. Hunter-seeker drones, ornithopters, Holtzman shields, chrysknives: even as a casual Dune fan, it is hard not to get excited when creating and using such iconic technology.
The world is genuinely impressive for its verticality in both directions. There are towering cliffs and spires between the dunes, and a ravine stretches across an entire region so deep that I first thought it must be a bottomless void meant to be avoided. Nope. There is a bottom, but it is so far down I cannot even see it. Getting around is a blast because I can climb almost anything as long as my stamina holds out. Add a grappling hook and suspensors, and I can yank myself upward, continue rocketing skyward, or glide hundreds of meters down without fall damage. I can even store sandbikes and ornithopters inside a special tool in my inventory, which is silly in the best way. Like my horse in Elden Ring, I summon my bike or 'thopter when I need it and pocket it when I do not. Funcom clearly wanted its world to be a playground, not a chore, to traverse. 🚀
The Endgame Is Strange but I Dig It
The most controversial part of Dune: Awakening is the endgame. First comes the Landsraad, a political framework that is part resource collection, part crafting chores, part PvP, and weirdly part bingo card. It uses a 5x5 grid of tasks that refresh each week. If players of one faction complete a line of five tasks, they lock out the other faction and get to vote on a new weekly server setting, like access to unique vendors or reduced crafting costs. There is strategy in completing your own row while blocking your opponents.
Hot take: I dig it. One afternoon, when some Landsraad tasks appeared, my guild leader and I scurried around to fulfil them. One task required delivering gems found only in buried caches, so we mounted scanners on our 'thopters and barrelled out over the desert to dig them up while dodging sandworms and quicksand. Later, we mass-produced knives for another task and raced out to kill members of an NPC faction for another. Dashing around to complete these milestones is grindy but fun, and it feels satisfying to see a task completed knowing I contributed. I also earn rewards like money or gear for pitching in.
The problem is timing. If I had not logged in that day, or even during those particular few hours, I would have missed all that fun. Even on the medium-population server I play on, the Landsraad bingo board was completed barely two days into the new week. I like that just a couple of players working together can have an impact on the endgame in a short amount of time. It is less great that the winner of the political bingo match can be decided so quickly. As players reach the endgame and stockpile obscene amounts of materials, I have a hard time imagining how this system will stay satisfying for casual players who mostly play in the evenings or on weekends.
The Deep Desert Is Where the Risk Lives
The highest-tier resources, needed for endgame vehicles and weapons, only appear in the deep desert. That is a majority-PvP zone many times larger than the PvE map. It is also where I find rare blueprints for the best gear and industrial amounts of spice. Even a quick raid on an NPC base in the deep desert fills my pockets with incredibly useful loot, and after my first visit all I wanted to do was go back. The problem? More sandworms want to eat me, and plenty of other players want to gank me.
I have not done a ton of PvP, and I have lost all but a single fight, but I still mostly enjoy it. Compared with the brain-dead NPCs, it is exciting to see players use skills and weapons unpredictably, even when they are using them to ruin my day. Take the guy I callously sniped while he was exploring a shipwreck in the deep desert. I felt bad because he had no idea I was there, so I let him self-revive. He then wrecked me with stuns, a grenade, and well-delivered knife blows. He did not return the favor and allow me to self-revive. This is Arrakis, after all. I do not expect to always make it out in one piece. 😅
The rest of PvP in the endgame zone is mostly done with choppers and rockets, which feels like an odd design choice in a game where I spent nearly a hundred hours building skills that have nothing to do with airborne combat. It can be brutal. I have been chased halfway across the map while being pummeled by missiles from other 'thopters, but I do not really hate it. I like the risk of making excursions into the PvP zone, just as I like tempting fate with sandworms. This is Arrakis, after all.
Final Thoughts After 100 Hours
I have enjoyed nearly all of my time in Dune: Awakening. I like most of the survival grind, there is tons of Dune tech that feels cool to craft and use even if I am not up on 4,000 years of Duncan Idaho lore, and I mostly dig the endgame systems even though they are oddly designed. The best compliment I can give is that even after 100 hours, when I see a sandworm breach or hear another player's 'thopter approaching, Dune: Awakening still makes my heart pound. 💀🔥
This discussion is informed by The Verge - Gaming, whose reporting often highlights how modern online games balance spectacle, survival friction, and live-service endgame hooks. In the context of Dune: Awakening, that lens fits especially well: the game’s strongest moments come from high-stakes traversal, sandworm-driven danger, and the tension between solitary exploration and multiplayer conflict, while its grind-heavy systems and time-sensitive political endgame show the same tradeoffs that define many ambitious survival MMOs.