It’s been over a year since Dune Awakening debuted on PC (you’ll never guess in which month). Depending on who you ask, it was either a fantastic, atmospheric survival game, or a tedious desert trek even more boring than someone trying to explain Children of Dune to you unsolicited in a crowded bar. Now, alongside a big update on PC, it’s arrived on PS5 and Xbox Series X, just in time to binge during the wait for Dune: Part Three.

Regardless of what you thought of it, there’s no denying Funcom created an impressive open-world take on Arrakis, Dune’s super-deadly desert planet. We called it a “true Dune love letter” in our Dune Awakening review. A beautiful recreation that nailed the look of Villeneuve’s films, all made with a clear love for the source material and a clear hatred of onboarding anyone not familiar with said source material. Yeah, fair warning – if the words ‘Bene Gesserit’ are gibberish to you, do not start here.

DuneScape

The good news is it’s still a visual treat on PS5. You can choose between lovely silky-smooth 60fps, which we all know is the mode a true Messiah would play. Or you can blaspheme and play at 30fps, which admittedly adds more visual detail and suffers less pop-in I suppose. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m a 60fps stan. The game feels far better to play, still looks terrific, and the pop-in is minimal enough to be a worthwhile compromise.

The setup; you’re some nobody who’s being shipped off to Arrakis to enjoy a life of endless slavery. But then your ship is blasted out of the sky, leaving you stranded in the middle of the desert (to be fair, Arrakis is basically all desert). The sun wants to burn you alive, water is seemingly scarcer than a first-party PlayStation game release, and a walk on open sands will likely end with you in the belly of a giant worm. Yikes.

It’s a great hook for a survival game. My genre favourites, Subnautica and Grounded, love throwing you into a desperate situation, knowing that it’ll be far more rewarding when you somehow survive against impossible odds. Considering Arrakis could only be more hostile if the ground was made out of freshly-unpinned grenades, Dune Awakening has the potential to be one of the best survival games and a true all-timer.

Except, over a year since release, this still feels like a game that’s spread itself too thin without nailing the basics. It doesn’t want to be seen as ‘just’ a survival MMO – it now even has a strictly single-player mode. It’s also got stealth, shooting, climbing, flying, vehicle combat, and more. But, all those moving parts aren’t as polished as they could be, meaning the core survival experience suffers.

Take the water system. Water is everything on Arrakis. It powers your base, your tech, your powers, and you quickly start to suffer when you run out. You can drink the dew from flower patches for some limited hydration, but it’s clear from the disgusted bark your character makes that Dune Awakening considers this gross. That’s why it encourages you to murder people and harvest water from their blood instead. OK then.

Forcing you to become a desert vampire is a wonderfully nasty idea, let down by the game’s enemies being dumber than rocks. The smarter ones will hang back and shoot you, though they’ll still rarely get into cover or do anything to avoid your gunshots. But they’re practically MENSA members compared to the suicidally-stupid grunts who sprint towards you with knives, somehow oblivious to the fact I’m emptying my gun into them. By the time they reach me, they collapse dead at my feet, blood ready for the taking. Er, thanks, I guess?

In the world of Dune, characters have shield suits that make guns useless, forcing everyone to engage in close-quarters melee combat. Some characters in Awakening are wearing these, and the sight of one running towards you is properly tense, especially considering how much better the knife combat is than the utterly pedestrian gunplay. Knife combat is a little unwieldy, but that works here. A knife fight to the death in the desert should feel desperate and scrappy, after all.

But why are enemies who aren’t wearing these shields – which is most of them, early on – also running towards me as if they are? One quest giver sent me to a testing facility and warned me that the people there had lost their minds. He described how they would run up to people and attack them senselessly. Buddy, that’s half the idiots in this game!

Water shame

Because scavengers are so easily dispatched, that means the water they carry – which should be a precious resource – is easy to get, too. I set up my base near a camp where two scavengers reliably respawn, meaning I have two fresh water bags on tap. True, If you’re playing single-player you can turn up the difficulty, but that doesn’t stop enemies behaving mindlessly.

This did not go unnoticed in our three-star Dune Awakening verdict last year (“Both extremely compelling and extraordinarily boring, sometimes at the same time”). But it’s elements like the “dull combat” that I was hoping would have been spruced up by now. Other potentially winning features still feel too janky, like its The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild-style climbing.

Like in Nintendo’s classic, you can basically clamber up anything so long as you watch your stamina meter. Getting up a sheer cliff is mostly fine, but descending is still an imprecise chore, your character far too happy to fling themselves away from the cliff and take the quicker, more fatal way down. At least Link could survive a decent tumble, whereas in the early-game of Dune Awakening, your body is more fragile than games editor Oscar Taylor-Kent whenever I mildly criticize the Ocarina of Time remake.

Let’s take a break from all this whining to talk about what Awakening does do well. The skill tree is full of great treats, including a terrific dash move for escaping Sandworms like a Looney Tunes character, and a hookshot that counters some of my complaints with the climbing. Its atmosphere and sense of place is spot-on. The power curve, though too stingy and slow, is rewarding if you persevere. Eventually you’ll craft wearables that negate fall damage entirely which is somewhat a solution to the janky climbing.

And who doesn’t like the idea of building their own awesome desert base? Me. I don’t like it. Because I had to do it on PS5 with a DualSense, an experience about as friendly on the hands as sticking them in a couple of Pain Boxes, followed by an immediate vinegar bath.

Now obviously translating a complex PC game’s UI to console is a nightmare. Baldur’s Gate 3 managed it – just – whereas my recent Mistfall Hunter adventures showed how menus can come unstuck. But considering Dune Awakening’s UI was a bit of a mess on PC, the poor PS5 version never really stood a chance.

Basic things you want are a chore to track down, buried in sub-menus within sub-menus. Open the pause screen and you can’t see your objectives, which means by the time you do figure out which God-Emperor damn tab-menu-tab you need to be in, you’ve long forgotten what you were looking for anyway.

Over a year ago we said this game was “hindered by obtuse menus that make finding various projects on the tech trees and placebales an exercise in frustration.” If that’s been improved at all for this release, I shudder to think how bad it was before. Something’s gone awry in your survival game when cold-blooded murder is a brain-off grind, but figuring out which menu the fabricator is hiding in has cost me what remains of my hair.

There’s a decent Dune experience in here, but one I’d only recommend persevering with if you have a deep love of the source material. If you’re more a casual fan of Timothée Chalamet movies, then I’m shocked to inform you that, unofficially, Lies of P is a far less stressful option you should consider playing instead.

Dune Awakening was played on PS5, with code provided by the publisher.

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