Dune: Awakening PS5 review: solo campaign finished, revamped endgame, base upkeep taxes gone, 85 score, combat still brutal
- Dune: Awakening's PS5 port adds a completed single-player campaign (Book One finished) that plays solo without setting up a private server, and the reviewer ran the whole game that way.
- Console content includes an augmentation and specialization system, a revamped endgame, new campaign levels, and quality-of-life fixes such as removing the base upkeep taxes players used to pay.
- Difficulty settings now expose sandworms, storms, enemy behavior, and mining rates, and the reviewer says defaults stay punishing: water runs out almost constantly even with a stillsuit, and sandstorms drain health in seconds.
- Combat is unchanged: downing most enemies takes a stack of darts, shields resist melee, and death means crossing the desert to recover a corpse unless players keep dropping new spawn points.
- The reviewer scores the PS5 version 85 and calls it a bigger, better version of Funcom's survival RPG, while arguing the dense Dune lore and the base-building survival loop pull against each other.