Recent reviews by Fire2box

3700x, RTX 4070 Playing on a Quest 2 via Steam Link VR over Wifi 6 is pretty solid. It's not photorealistic but Half Life has never looked or felt better to me.

The gameplay is fun and the puzzles could leave me stumped for a few moments. There are some parts where I got jump scared but there's more humor than horror I'd say with the quips between alyx and the guy giving her vauge directions over a radio. The most difficult part is aimming with ironsights (before upgrading weapons) in VR.

Takes me back to childhood when I was playing Nuclear Strike on PS1 and feeling like a kid again playing a video game is such a rare thing. The missions that are in game currently took me a little more than 2 hours to get through so there's not a lot of content. But the story has me engaged and wanting more. The biggest downsides to me so far is 1. some of the helicopters are overpowered (Looking at you Hind) 2. using the dual sense controller to play the open expanded map button is the share button and not the huge touchpad button and I can't change it for whatever reason. :/

7/8/2026 update: the devs are aware of the H74 bug and are manually fixing the problem until they figure out a long term fix. Getting their attention along with other affected players was virtual pulling teeth though.

7/6/2026 Urgent warnings for those looking to buy the game! These are clearly all major issues for an always online MMO like video game. Proceed with utmost caution and listen to player feedback (not just my own) before you buy.

First off there's currently a 100% game breaking bug of Error code H74. My personal example of this is dying in the deep desert and clicking to spawn at my base in the newly formed PvE zone. Upon doing this the game will be forever stuck in a loading state until it spits out H74 error code on the main menu. Trying to spawn on other sietchs on my server meets the same fate, this is supposed to be a work around for some but not all players clearly. If this is not fixed by monday night/tuesday morning or the deep desert weekly storm that wipes out everything. My character and base will be wiped out of all holdings.

I can't even log into a second character on a completely different server and that character hasn't died once at all. I will not make a 3rd character on yet another 100% new to me server just toi repeat the process and see the same early gameplay.

Another issue people are facing are cheaters! Cheaters that can not only ruin your time in the deep desert but also go into your sietch in the hagga basin where the vast majority of the game is set. But they can walk into your base without premission and look from your chests stealing resources you spent dozens if not hundreds of hours collecting! Meanwhile if you report this to funcom and ask for said resources refunded? they will say they can't give you any.

This feeds into the next major problem with the end game and especially player market. The item duplication glitches. I don't know how it's done as I have no interest in it but Funcom knows of this issue and says there will be consequences for it. So far I've yet to see anyone meet said consequences.


Despite these issues I still love the base of the game. If error H74 lasts for another week or two I will be asking Steam for a refund knowing all my progress will be lost if I ever come back. If a game is rendered fully unplayable to me I can assume Steam will grant said refund it would be the first time I've ever done it on my account too. Again I deeply love the game as you can see by my playtime and I know the community manager on discord said the team is aware of the issue but that's all I've heard. There's no public PSA in the main menu telling players to avoid loading into their base or however else h74 error code occurs for others. This is a incredibly serious issue and one that's more critical than anything else right now IMHO.


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I now have 40 hours in game time and I'm still only in the middle tier of progression and am currently working on building my first buggy, I've been eaten by a worm twice and had two very close calls. I think I can safely call this the most fun multiplayer survival game I've ever played except for of course Terraria but that one was 2D, here we have a #D playground. The interact-able NPC's and audio log recordings are honestly well written and I'm always taking my time to listen to them it feels like a very lived in world. The music is also fantastic and stumbling onto new locations can be very cool and rewarding sometimes.

Also the way to reveal the map is incredibly fun. climbing up to the highest point and shooting off a scanning drone beacon that LIDAR's the entire sector it just looks so cool and climbing is actually fun, stamina only drains when you are moving on walls and you can climb everywhere.


My biggest gameplay complaint so far is that the Parry in the melee combat system is very temperamental as to when it wants to work as GameRanx said it very much feels like a suggestion vs a command, this sadly does not have the responsive melee of say Ghost of Tsushima. The only areas I found where PvP are enabled are in the large shipwreck sites and so far on the server I'm on no one has seemingly tried to block paths with their base building.

My biggest tip is to always craft backups of your current favorite gear and of course look up youtube guides if you are ever confused on something.
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100+ hour and Guild update

I've now crossed 100 hours. I have a Scout and Assault Ornithoper and have now joined a guild on my sub-server Basin 12 hours ago. Before joining I made several ventures into the deep desert solo and while it's a PVP zone past the starting PvE "safe" zone I was able to sneakily preform what I wanted out there on my "low population" official server. For the past 2 hours at time of writing this update I was doing nothing but gathering spice with the middle tier sand compacter tool and have over 20,000 spice to show for it. I was however playing very off peak time for my servers region but I've encountered people at the large spice field doing just the same as me.

I am looking forward to helping contribute to the the end game "Landsradd" in a couple days when the deep desert is reset by a massive storm.

Also that weekly storm. It affects the PvE region we all collectively play in rescattering resource nodes. Each region remains the same of resource makeup but the spots will shift weekly. To counter this I put a scanner on the front of my Scout Thopter and it's been incredibly useful to play routes with my buggy to farm resources.


100 hours in and this game continues to truly hold my interest I am addicted to the spice! Again asides from Terraria (can't beat it's price nor content) this is the best survival multiplayer game I've ever played. But Dune Awaking is the best 3D survival game I've played. I enthusiastically recommend and only more so for those who like the Dune universe and/or '20s movies.


Edit: 6/23/2025

I while flying solo to capture some spice was chased in the deep desert by 4 players for simply trying to collect Spice with a Static Compacter at a "Grand Daddy Worm" Spice Field. I was fired upon with multiple rockets while only having a scout ornithopter with storage which means zero rockets what so ever. They broke one of my four wings and fell out of rendering distance range, I limped along to the PvE shield wall shelf and made it out with maybe 400 spice sand total. I was only concerned for my special mark 5 wings to be honest as once you have a buggy it's easy to get a Mk 4/5 ornithopter again.

I've since upgrade to Mk6 wings to have the fastest glide speed but regardless it was a gank fest. This sort of toxic behavior will drive PvE'ers which is like 96% of the entire game anyway from what the Devs themselves call "Endgame content"

Also the fact that the Assault Ornithopter is tantamount to a flying chest is lobotomy level stupidity on the devs part and they said they will be making balance changes to both of these ornithopters.


Also "fun" fact, much like Helldivers 2 which also uses BattleEye Anticheat. Cheaters are already in this game and can steal your ornitophers and I assume buggy, sandbikes and the like as well. There's no way you can defend against this except stay out of the Deep Desert.


TL'DR: Amazing PvE world that feels very true to the Dune universe with dumb and bug filled enemy NPC's. Terrible Endgame Experiences that force PvP and invite the most toxic tryhards you'll ever see wanting to curbstomper their servers deep desert of solo players and bad pilots. PvP at this point is how many rockets you can spam and how many of those can hit your target.

Edit: Funcom is now making significant changes to the Deep Desert so PvE and PVP people can both enjoy it in full.

Just as fun innovative co-op gameplay as It Takes Two but I'd call it an worse story/writing The villain if you can even truly call them that's motivation is pretty timely for 2025 though but the game never calls it out by it's true name. I've also never experienced more glitches in a Hazelight game than in this one with dysyncing being the biggest one despite both of us being on fiber or cable hardwired to our respective modems. Mio and Zoe both are alright characters but it takes them roughly half the game to really feel any true investment in. And with Josef saying this game is inspired by his daughters (who I believe are twins) it makes me question Zoe's relationship issues with her sister.

either way glitches and all it was a very fun game and some of the gameplay elements were not at all what I expected like co-op pinball? Brilliant idea.

The bugs were too many IMHO but they were all easily fixed. the bigger problem was one boss fight in the game where it's not communicated at all how to progress as we only had a button prompt and nothing else would do anything. The boss destroying us over and over with no way to seemingly stop it I had to look up a guide about it that finally explained what to do.

If Hazelight makes another game I would really like to see them hire a very good writing team as so far this trilogy of co-op games A Way Out has the best story and even it's melodramatic. Each game in this "series" and I use that term loosely as hell, the stories just kinda get worse IMHO.If I had had a person I'd suggest it would likely be Anthony Birch who helped turn Borderlands around with his writing credits for Borderlands 2.

The most heartfelt and relaxing indie game I ever played.

Bring back text chat to GTA Online voice chat is disabled by default too so even if I talk hardly anyone's going to hear it let alone the players that matter let alone for those of us with any varying degrees of disabilities that limit our voice chat interactions. I will not be doing multiplayer heists without it and it's impossible to lend support to sell missions in public lobbies. Bring, It. Back.

RTGI really does make a difference though but it's taxing even my 4070 in 1440p. DLSS doesn't help all that much if at all.

A worthy upgrade of 10 dollars if you have the base complete edition on steam Nixxies has done it again with a PC remaster.

13 hours played and I still haven't made it past the first boss but I have so much damn fun anyhow. The amount of time you can sink into this game will blow you away and you'll probably never touch solitaire again for a "simple" card game.

An fun and addictive Dunegon Clawer.

An very additive tower defense game with a very engaging tetris like element. I put 4 hours into the demo alone before buying the game. The only two problems for me is 1. demo play doesn't progress into the base game. 2. There was a level where there was a viable path for mobs but it said path blocked and wouldn't let me place it down. I still won that round though.