Best Dune Games

Frank Herbert's 1965 novel, Dune , was a game-changer for science fiction. Due to its immense popularity and sustained place in the mainstream of science fiction, it's seen many adaptations. From David Lynch's Dune to the original 1992 video game, Herbert's world has long been a playground for creatives.


Expanding on that, he said, "I know lots of people who love vehicles and vehicle sim games. Okay, it’s a lot easier and more straightforward, but it's still fun. The base level, just getting on a sand bike and driving around, is fun. Flying Ornithopters is fun. Yeah, combat will come…It will be fun and engaging. These are the things which people will gravitate to and this is something we picked up on with Conan Exiles. People make it their o


**Dune: Awakening ** brings together survival and MMO elements with the beloved IP as a framework, taking players to Arrakis where they’ll fight against sandworms, hot sun, other players, and a myriad of other threats to become a successful desert dweller. The title comes from Funcom, which previously produced another massive online experience with Conan Exiles . Though the game doesn’t have a finalized release date yet besides a 2025 window, it’s already entered a playable beta for players lucky enough to snag a s


Whether it be the scorching desert or the few underground laboratories I stumbled upon, Dune Awakening Beginner guide Awakening is visually stunning. Funcom told me it is planning to "elevate the game above the jank of most survival games," and for the most part that intention is obvious when you play. The lighting in the desert, particularly at night, is gorgeous, while the inhabited areas are far more detailed than you might expect from the ge


Base building is another big part of Dune: Awakening ’s overall gameplay, with a separate building mode reminiscent of other base building games like No Man’s Sky . Players can scroll through sections like basic components such as walls and roofs, crafting machinery, and assorted furniture and see an outline of what it would look like before placement. These also come in styled sets for Houses that fans will be familiar with, offering different aesthetics, from the sleeker House Harkonnnen to a more traditional-style Atrei

While it isn’t clear if working with the Harkonnens in Dune: Awakening is required, it does seem like building bases in the desert is a major part of the game. While I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of gameplay and ignore how unlikely that safely building such structures would be on Arrakis, I’m still not so enthusiastic about actually doing it. Being an outsider building bases on Arrakis feels very **counter-intuitive to the major anti-colonial message the Dune series communicates


Waking up in a nearby moisture-sealed cave, the opening section of the game walks us through basic equipment like the knife, crafting simple items like healkits, extracting dew from nearby plants, and the freeform climbing system like Conan Exiles . We then met the mysterious figure, named Zantara, who explained we'd need to seize control of an Ornithopter to escape. To do so, we had to go back into the wreckage of the ship and activate the commander's emergency beacon to bring in reinforcements. In crossing to the downed ship, we needed to avoid sunlight or risk suffering the effects of sunstroke (which modifies every aspect of how a player navigates Dune: Awakening ). We killed a surviving prisoner with our trusty knife to take their cutteray, which is used to remove obstacles and obtain resour


Funcom has chosen to forgo a traditional hunger meter, you must think about your thirst at all times instead. Being in the sun dehydrates you faster than standing in the shade, and water supplies are finite. You can consume particular flowers to fill the first bar of your hydration meter, or extract and drink the water of enemies you’ve defeated once you’ve built the means to do


I only saw a fraction of the world, too. Beyond the desert in which your adventure begins, there’s the deep desert where PvP occurs alongside various cities you can eventually travel to. What I played was sparse in its presentation and content, so it’ll be interesting to see how the more populated locations incorporate survival mechanics. Will the ability to meet other people and buy resources make everything easier, or will having to share resources make us fight even harder to surv


As Frank Herbert wrote in the first Dune novel, "Beginnings are such delicate times," and players who are dumped on Arrakis and forced to survive are, indeed, living through delicate times. At a surface level, Dune: Awakening 's gameplay is as demanding as the sands of Arrakis. It has a clear audience, targeting hardcore survival players and lifelong Dune fans who appreciate its more hard sci-fi approach, and the game's various features and mechanics would fit right into a Dune novel. I was recently invited to Oslo, Norway to play Dune: Awakening , and after six hours with it, it's clear there's a lot of depth in its mechan