DUNE AWAKENING

AWAKENING

- Words by Jose Alvarez

Multiplayer online games, while plentiful, often have to balance the demands of the player base while maintaining their identity. Survival games add an even bigger twist to the genre: working together to fight off the environment and even other players who want to take everything you've built up and earned in the game.

Dune: Awakening is based on Frank Herbert's science fiction franchise Dune, which spawned numerous books, comics, films, TV shows, and, of course, video games. But does Dune: Awakening continue to add to the franchise's glowing reputation?

Dune video games have been around since 1992, when Dune and Dune II were released for PC as adventure strategy and real-time strategy (RTS) games, respectively. The latter game became a watershed in RTS history, and while other Dune games have come and gone, bringing an iconic sci-fi franchise to an online multiplayer world almost seems like a match made for the survival game aficionado.

You take the role of an undercover agent in the world of Arrakis against the backdrop of a civil war between House Atreides and House Harkonnen in an alternate universe where Dune protagonist Paul Atreides was never born. You are tasked to find the Firemen and awaken the Sleeper. Before I set foot into the game, I had to also look at the source material: read the Dune books, watch some movies, and a couple of episodes of the TV shows to get an idea of how well the game holds up to the source material itself.