[Review] Dune: Awakening is an excellent dip into Arrakis

A Dune survival MMO that keeps sucking us in like a sandworm

I need to admit it, I wasn’t expecting much out of the new Dune game. Licensed games don’t always hit the mark, especially when they’re trying to accomplish it with a huge property like Dune. It’s interesting. I love when a studio is able to kind of create a new genre; this is a game that just doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Dune: Awakening takes a survival aspect and combines it with an MMO, which on the surface is unique when mashed together, but then it also introduces a social element where we need to connect and interact A LOT with other players. This is essentially a huge action RPG inside of Dune with survival crafting — and it just works. It’s really fun.

An angle I love is that we are tasked with shoosing a House to align to. We need to work towards a faction, ally ourselves, and help them (or hurt them). It can affect the story that plays out, but only in the ways that we work to. The story itself is set in an alternate timeline where Paul Atreides was not born. The Great Houses are there, but because the HERO did not arrive things have played out differently. It’s a way for the developers to not make the game canon and yet to stay true to what the universe of Dune is. It’s still Dune, it’s still what we love, but it’s just an acceptible and exciting tangent off.

This is all baked into the multiple layers of how the game of runs. There’s the immediate stuff we can do, like teaming up, working our way up through the ranks of like mercenaries, making our way into the Houses. We’re kind of just integrated with a faction, so to speak, grinding and leveling up. And then there’s a social system at play, with emergent gameplay where players naturally group up with battles and wars back and forth. The story revolves around these endless shifts. And then we have our own base camp, and start zooming out from there. Our camp, which we build up and scavenge for, is placed on a server with dozens (or hundreds?) of other people. That sort of settlement is part of a larger area, which is part of a larger area, etc. This being Arrakis, once a week or so a giant storm will come through and ravage the serveres, decimating camps and resetting things. It’s not necessarily the “seasons” we’d find in other MMOs or online experiences, because it happens so often, but it always keeps the game fresh and we never feel like we’re too far behind.

It’s refreshing, because even when I miss a week I can hop back in without other players becoming OP. The parts that keep us coming back, the bases and the Houses and the story, are more enjoyable with these server wipes. We don’t lose everything, just the things we need to lose to prevent us from becoming stagnant. If I miss a week, or go on vacation, I’m not worried to jump back in.

And it all takes place on Arrakis. It’s a really cool environment to place this kind of game in. The world is built on the constant harshness and battling for resources; there are moments when we’ll see something far in the sky start to fall down to the planet and we know it’s a mad dash to recover whatever loot is there. Oh, and there are sandworms. Big ass sandworms.

Dune: Awakening is fun. It’s an MMO for people who don’t play MMOs, but then the folks who do like the online side or the survival side will get a kick out of it. There’s fun content in there right now, and if the support continues then it’ll be great to dip in often and see what the dust storms are kicking up.

This review is based on Steam codes sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest for July 8, 2025.