Dune: Awakening

Dune: Awakening — игра, которая сначала затягивает, а потом оставляет только разочарование Первые 50–100 часов игра действительно может казаться интересной: атмосфера Дюны, выживание, база, прогресс, первые PvP/PvE-активности — всё это работает и поначалу увлекает. Но дальше начинается главная проблема: ластгейм пустой и скучный. Когда первичный эффект новизны проходит, становится понятно, что заниматься особо нечем. Прогресс превращается в рутину, мотивация пропадает, а игра начинает ощущаться не как живой MMO-survival, а как набор повторяющихся действий ради самих действий. Отдельный и самый неприятный момент — блокировка аккаунта. Я получил бан, при этом нормальную причину блокировки мне так и не объяснили. Я много раз писал в техническую поддержку, пытался разобраться, но в ответ — молчание. Ни прозрачности, ни адекватной коммуникации, ни желания помочь игроку. В итоге Dune: Awakening для меня стала большим разочарованием. Потенциал у игры был огромный, но сейчас это проект, где сначала ты тратишь десятки часов, а потом сталкиваешься либо со скучным эндгеймом, либо с полным безразличием поддержки. Не рекомендую к покупке. С большой вероятностью вы просто потеряете время и деньги. На старте может быть весело, но дальше игра быстро сдувается, а в случае проблем с аккаунтом вы рискуете остаться один на один с молчащей техподдержкой.

I enjoyed the game until a point. When the glitches got so bad it literally ate your vehicles that (You know, the good ones you spent 3-4 hours farming for) fell through the world, then told "tough luck!" by support. I got very tired of it really fast. I enjoy farming/grinding games, but this was excessive. Definitely not for casual players, or players who don't enjoy PVP. Also it had a big problem with the game crashing while you are in the middle of nowhere and you log in to find out you died and lost everything. I was very excited for this game, but it was also a big let down to find out there was nothing to do at end game besides PVP.

cahildim DUNEyanın rengine kandım.

300 hours into a mega base I kept alive as a chore just for it to get finger blasted when the server shut down while I just so happen to be 400 miles away from my computer on vacation with not enough of a grace period to come back and recover it...the things I would do for a refund are beyond logic.

I really wanted to like this game and I did for parts of it. I played about 300 hours and I came to the conclusion that this is not a game for solo players. The grind is just too difficult and the game is just not balanced in this regard. The last straw came when I lost everything I've been working on for 2 weeks in a storm. My mistake or not, it's just not a good time in general when a game is that unforgiving .

You can read about the positive sides of this game in plenty of other reviews. I’m going to focus on the parts that feel bad, unfinished, or in desperate need of a spice intervention. The combat is rough. It feels like a 20-year-old MMO wearing a fake mustache and pretending to be a third-person action RPG. There is too much jank, characters get stuck too often, the camera regularly joins the enemy team, and enemies seem to have unlimited stamina while you fight like someone who just discovered knees. It does not feel smooth, tactical, or satisfying. The overland map is one of the weakest parts of the game, and it has annoyed me since release. I do not understand why I need to fly around on a top-down map just to reach cities or points of interest. Either let us fly around a real map like in Hagga Basin, or remove the system entirely and let us simply select the city or POI we want to travel to. Right now it feels like a loading screen with extra steps and worse steering. This becomes especially painful during missions. A typical quest sends you to find something in Hagga Basin, then bring it to someone in Arrakeen or Harko Village. So you fly to the border of Hagga Basin, wait through a 1 to 2 minute loading screen, “fly” across the overland map to the city, wait through another 3 to 5 minute loading screen, run to the quest giver, run back, wait through another long loading screen, use the overland map again, zone back into Hagga Basin, wait another 1 to 2 minutes, then fly to the next step of the mission. Then the game looks you dead in the eyes and asks you to do it again. The truly mind-blowing part is that some missions let you simply call the quest giver and be done with it. So the technology exists. Apparently, half the NPCs have phones and the other half are committed to wasting your evening as a lifestyle choice. Inventory and storage are also a pain in the ass, which seems to be a general disease in modern survival games. There is no proper total overview of your resources, and the “circuit” system is convoluted, unintuitive, and barely works with the build tool. If you change the output circuit of fabricators or refiners to anything other than circuit 1, their inventory becomes invisible to the build tool. You can have 10,000 ingots sitting right there in a refiner, but the build tool acts like they are hidden in another dimension unless the output is set to circuit 1. Whoever designed that system needs to be locked in a room with their own inventory UI until they understand what they have done. There is a good game buried here, but some of the core systems are working very hard to keep it buried. Combat needs serious work, travel needs to be rethought, inventory needs a proper overhaul, and mission flow needs to respect the player’s time much more than it currently does. It's fun, especially in Co-Op until the fatigue and frustration wins.

I'm sad because this is a very good game in many ways. The universe is appealing and immersive, the base-building is very well-done. I don't mind some grind, this was a good balance. The reason I'm sad is because I was hoping for a good solo experience, and I found it just too difficult. I'm an experienced gamer, albeit with old man reflexes - but I've beaten Dark Souls and other "difficult" games through persistence and craftiness, so I'm no slouch either. I can see how the quests could be very fun in a group. They're designed for that. I'm talking about game-progression quests that unlock necessary crafting recipes - these aren't optional - death really hurts when you've got a long way back to your corpse, and chances are you won't make it and end up losing everything - I can see why it was designed this way, and if I was playing with friends all of these issues would be mitigated enough - but solo it's just too hard to be fun - for me. A gamer with higher skills and more experience may find the challenge to be exhilarating but for me it was just an exercise in frustration which is not why I like gaming.

**Not Recommended** I have around 25 hours in Dune: Awakening, and while I can see the potential, the game is filled with frustrating design decisions that constantly get in the way of having fun. The biggest issue is durability. Literally everything degrades: weapons, armor, tools, vehicles... everything. Constantly having to monitor durability on every single item is tedious rather than engaging. Players have hated excessive durability systems for years, yet this game takes the concept to the extreme. One example: I parked my sandbike before logging off. The next day I logged back in and it had completely decayed. My base was far away, I had no repair tools, and I couldn't even continue playing. Instead, I had to spend my time walking across the map just to rebuild or repair something that shouldn't have disappeared in the first place. The respawn system made things even worse. After moving to the second region and building a new base, the game still respawned me in the first region after I died. My bike was stranded in the second region, and without a vehicle you can't safely cross the desert because of the sandworm. Since I had already dismantled my first base and moved all my resources, I was forced to start farming resources again, rebuild another vehicle, and basically recreate infrastructure I had already spent hours building. That's not challenging—it's simply bad game design. Being eaten by the sandworm is another terrible mechanic. I understand that it fits the lore, but good lore does not automatically make good gameplay. Losing absolutely everything because you made one mistake is incredibly punishing. Even worse, some high-tier items require rare recipes. If you lose an epic item to the worm before finding another recipe, it's simply gone. The game actively punishes experimentation instead of encouraging it. There are also countless quality-of-life issues that make the experience unnecessarily annoying: * NPC names aren't shown until you talk to them, forcing you to speak to everyone just to find the right person. * Fuel levels for vehicles aren't visible in the quick interface—you have to open management menus just to check your tank. * Many mechanics are poorly explained or unintuitive. * Moving an entire base is unnecessarily complicated, and even the available relocation tools don't work particularly well. None of these problems individually would be a deal breaker, but together they create constant friction. It often feels like the game is wasting your time instead of respecting it. The gunplay is... fine. Maybe a 5/10. Not terrible, but nothing special either. What surprises me most is that the game has already been out for quite some time and has received numerous updates, yet many of these issues still feel like day-one problems. So many systems could have been simplified or redesigned by now, but instead they remain frustrating. Dune: Awakening isn't a terrible game. There are enjoyable moments, and I genuinely wanted to like it since I very much like the universe. Unfortunately, the amount of unnecessary frustration outweighs the fun. My free time is too limited to spend it fighting the game's design instead of enjoying the game itself.

Imagine giving a game a negative review after playing it for hundreds of hours, it's wild. Count your hours of gametime and weigh it against what you earn as a wage at your regular everyday job. As if you get paid per hour and then maybe reconsider from that perspective. The least you can do is give it a thumbs up. Game is 10/10 and it is time to replay it.