What Are The Pros And Cons Of Dune Awakening 3 Weeks After Release?

Dune Awakening faithfully recreates Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi world, and for fans of the original, this highly restored approach provides an excellent gaming experience.

The game often uses harsh natural environments and empty desert spaces to control and guide the player’s pace of exploration, turning settings that could have been a disadvantage into advantages.

Pros

Dune Awakening is characterized by combining survival and MMORPG growth elements, which is a relatively new experience for most players.

If you have played any survival games before, or at least watched a Dune movie, you should have a general idea of ​​how to survive in this sandworm-infested world. In short, it is to collect resources, build yourself a preliminary shelter where you can sleep and rest, and upgrade your equipment in preparation for more dangerous areas with rarer Dune Awakening items.

The developers of Dune Awakening are obviously more comfortable with survival content, as they once made Conan Exiles (although its reviews were mixed). Some players may be discouraged by the harsh survival conditions at the beginning, but this is the fun of survival games: challenging nature, defeating nature, and controlling nature.

Dune Awakening sets many survival dilemmas for players, forcing them to quickly start looking for resources and enter the game state.

Dune Awakening has a day and night rotation, and the sun is the most common enemy faced by players. If you are directly exposed to the sun, you will start to dehydrate in just a few seconds.

Sandstorms will appear at irregular intervals. They roll across the entire map. As long as you stay in it, you will lose blood. You only have half a minute to find a shelter; and the most representative danger is those troublesome giant sandworms. If you stay in their territory for too long, they will be swallowed by them.

So you can’t just leisurely collect Dune Awakening items and then pick a nice place to build a base. Instead, you have to tense up your nerves to find shade behind rocks, try to avoid the scorching sun, drink every drop of drinking water that is left, and fight the environment every second you spend in the atmosphere.

All of this will be greatly improved as your technology level increases. When you go from walking to Sandbike to ornithopter. You gradually become able to deal with the world calmly, and you can get satisfaction. Although the combination of technology and survival is a bit strange, this is the weird style of the original book.

Cons

Base

However, sometimes this fanatical adherence to the settings of “Dune” can become quite annoying. The base you build in the initial area has many functional limitations, which forces you to move everything you have after you reach the advanced area, or abandon all Dune Awakening items in that base.

And when the game advances the main line, it will force you to abandon the original base. Although I understand the necessity of plot advancement, it is really annoying to suddenly receive a reminder that “the area is about to be evacuated” when “you have just built an ideal base and arranged a static water purification system”.

Combat

Compared with the cleverly conceived survival content, the combat part is lackluster.

Let’s talk about melee first. To be honest, this part feels like a temporary placeholder system to the players. The movements are stiff and there is almost no feedback from the attacks. Sometimes players can’t be sure whether they have hit the enemy. The combo mechanism is very simplified, and the animation is obviously repeated.

Especially when jumping and attacking, the action looks very much like the test action that comes with UE5. Even if you play with different weapons, such as short knives and long sticks, the combat experience is not much improved, and it is not refreshing at all.

The shooting part is slightly better, at least the shooting accuracy and feedback are acceptable, but the design concept is rather strange. Because of Holtzman shield in Dune setting, the gun bullets in the game have been changed to “slow projectiles”, and you have to aim at the enemy like throwing darts. After you are used to other FPS games, it takes a long time to adapt to this system.

Because of the existence of Holtzman shield, guns are often useless. They can basically completely block your bullets, which creates a strange combat experience. You need to switch back and forth between guns and melee weapons, and choose the appropriate weapon according to the enemy rushing over. Many times you have to choose between the swordsman who is sprinting towards you and the enemy holding a ranged weapon a few meters behind him, which may lead to a very passive combat rhythm.

But the problem is that it still arranges a lot of scenes that require you to “fight to solve”, and combat is the most disappointing part of the entire system.

In recent years, most games are not perfect at the first release, and Dune Awakening is no exception. But overall, the flaws do not outweigh the merits, and I look forward to the subsequent adjustments made by the developers.