I’m a huge fan of Dune: its Ornithopters, political intrigue, and of course, giant sand worms, were enough on their own to get me hooked on the idea of a Dune survival MMO. However, after all its glossy cinematic trailers raised my expectations, my hands-on time with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dune Awakening at Gamescom 2024 left me a little disappointed. It felt a bit like a clunky survival game from five years ago. In a year when we’ve ꦯgotten so many impressive games in the genre, including Enshrouded, it feels like Dune m🌠ight struggle to stand out.

The nature of survival games is that you must start with nothing. Where is the threat of survival if you arrive in the world with weapons, water, and a vehicle? But what this means is that the initial grind for resources tends to be dull. Dune Awakening does nothing to remedy this issue. You walk around, suck some moisture from desert🐈 plants, and then kill badly-scripted bandits to harvest metal scrap from their bases. The knife combat is clunky and unsatisfying, and the ranged weapons don’t feel much better. It’s just like you’re hitting them with a knife… but from far away. Eventually, you can harvest water from the blood of the dead, but even this loses its novelty factor pretty quickly.

Related
Monster🎉 Hunter Wilds Brings A New Lease Of Life To The Series

We played Monster Hunter W🦄ilds at Gamescom and were blown away by how immersive the world felt.

However, as I progressed in the demo, I started to see how Dune Awakening might have more than initially meets the eye. Once you get past the clunky combat and begin to explore the world, craft vehicles, and fly an Ornithopter, the game really opens up. A demo is obviously not the best way to see all of these things, let alone a demo with only a handful of players in it. Dune Awakening is cleಞarly meant to be played with hundreds o♚f other players, fighting over resources, teaming up, and getting eaten by giant worms.

Dune Awakening (2)-1

By far the highlight of my time with the game was when I was riding around on my sand bike, and began to hear a low rumble. Then, the thumping, the sand shifting – in the distance a giant worm reared its head from the sand. I tried to make it to an outcropping of nearby rock💧, but the worm had other plans. As I crested a sand dune, it burst out of the sand and devoured me and my bike whole. I was dead. Obviously. That’s the Dune survival MMO𓆉 experience I signed up for.

The base-building mechanics seemed fine, but not special. For whatever reason this is always something hard to get right in survival games, and Dune Awakening does have a neat co-op building feature which allows grouped players to contribute to building. You could have one player harvesting and another planning out the base simultaneously, which would save some of the busy work. But like in so many survival games, the snapping was a bit finicky, theꦐ clipping was a problem, and generally, it would just take a lot of time to build anything remotely cool. Some people love this, though, so that’s more a matter of preference.

Dune Awakening (1)

There was also a huge crafting menu with different items, fabricators for making new items, power sources, weapons, armor, and a lot more. It was difficult to parse this information from such a short d🎃emo, but it’s clear that anyone who likes progression in survival games will enjoy the systems in Dune Awakening: the aim being to finally master Arrakis, and make it hospitable. As a Dune fan, I’ve got to say this prospect is enticing.

Clearly a small demo at Gamescom is no way to enjoy the MMO aspects of Dune Awakening, but I can sort of see how they might play out. You form a guild, build bases, and then go on Spice Rai🎀ds, which are large-scale PvP events where multiple players duke it out for their share of the spice. Spice will likely be used to get better resources, probably some cosmetics chucked in there for good measure, and other rewards that we weren’t privy to during our session. The idea of a hundred or so players fighting on the sand only to be suddenly gulped down by a massive worm has definitely sold me o💝n at least giving Dune Awakening a shot when it releases.

Related
Reanimal Looks Set Toꦅ ♉Be Tarsier’s First Truly Scary Game

Reanimal doesn’t stray too far from Little Nightmares, b𝐆ut it does put more focus on the horror.