The Fremen are the missing link in Dune: Awakening's efforts to be more than a survival game

Among the first terrain fixtures you discover on Dune: Awakening's Arrakis are moisture seals: puffy wads of fabric that fill cave entrances to create makeshift microclimates, where travellers can escape the constant threat of dehydration. Awakening's moisture seal are, in practice, the paper lid on a tube of wilderness Pringles: poke through with your dagger to find resources and the occasional hostile NPC. But what if you could place your own moisture seals, rather than just tearing open the ones left by NPCs? I'd love to play a game in which you are constantly reading the barren landscape for the shallowest of shady depressions that can be plugged and converted into shelters. Think of the attentiveness it might teach, the sensitivity to the geometry of a world that can drain your O2 bar dry in moments.

Dune Awakening is not currently that game, unless I missed some unlocks in this weekend's beta. It is a routine-feeling survival MMO in which you wave your magic build-o-wand to create a perfectly cuboid, holographic "sub-fiefdom", then populate that cube with boxy habitats, power generators and 3D printers. These structures aren't artfully tucked into the geography, like the moisture seal shelters, but plastered rigidly on top of it. The beta's opening rock outcrops are absolutely clogged with them, most now forgotten as players hasten onward to the next objective, hence developer Funcom actually calling on people to clean up their old bases as they go.

Naturally, you'll need resources to conjure yourself a habitat, which means you'll need to constantly tap buttons as you explore to accrue gobbets of copper and plant fibre. The presence of a mining minigame, where you scan larger objects for cuttable seams, is designed to make resource-gathering feel like a mindful pursuit. In practice, it just forces your attention onto something that will never be more than a chore.

Awakening is also, in fairness, a game that extracts some fun and even novel mechanics from the workings of the Dune fiction. Heat stroke, for one: to avoid it, you'll need to cling to shadows as they shift around at the behest of the day-night cycle. This is the kind of attentiveness I was yearning for above: it's like a stealth game in which your enemy is a star. I enjoy hiding from the sunlight a lot more than defeating the early "Scavenger" opposition - these raggedy vagrants come in melee and projectile flavours, and are easily ambushed and outwitted by means of basic parries and peek-shooting.

More thrillingly, there are the sandworms. These omnivorous burrowing megafauna prowl the open desert between the rockier stretches, and are drawn to the sound of feet and engines. I've spent my first couple of hours in the game hopping between outcrops, and it's pleasantly alarming to feel the ground heave a little, scry an approaching sand cloud... and risk sprinting across the gap regardless. Later, there's the prospect of siccing those worms on rival players in the course of running a spice mining guild, by which point you'll hopefully have a grander, permanent base stocked with ornithopters and tanks.

Still, for every moderately distinctive thing Dune Awakening does, it lumbers you with another overfamiliar survival game routine. I am about 3.6 hours in right now, and the task at hand is to research and construct a more powerful power generator. These generic activities are more stupefying for being foisted on such an engrossing setting. Perhaps worst of all, there's Awakening's approach to the extraction of drinking water from blood, one of Dune's ghastlier and more personal rituals. Here, it's just another thing to farm with no apparent social context: the Scavengers respawn, so by all means go full Fallout Vampire.

The other way of framing all of the above is that Dune Awakening does not, currently, let you play as the Fremen - a nomad society who have developed their entire culture in response to the rigours of survival, from their justice system through the development of hermetic stilsuits, to the sanctity they attach to sharing blood. Instead, you play a wayfarer from another planet, sent to Arrakis by the scheming Bene Gesserit to search for the Fremen, who - in this particular narrative continuity - appear to have been wiped out by the Emperor and his Sardaukar shocktroopers.

During an initial, forboding interview with a Bene Gesserit matriarch, you get to choose a homeworld and a childhood mentor which equate to a starting class, abilities and skilltrees. Those who trained under an Atreides swordmaster get melee buffs and a staggering knee-charge; those with a military background get a grappling hook and prowess with firearms; those who were schooled by the Bene Gesserit can hypnotise and compel NPCs.

All of these skills and abilities match the game's opening trials and hazards, but they do, nonetheless, come across as impositions. It's as though Awakening's very survival game component were a cluster of imperial technologies clumsily applied to an unreceptive planet. Perhaps the point is to transcend them. In setting out to rediscover the Fremen, you are, of course, loosely following the narrative arc of Dune's Paul Atreides, who came to Arrakis as a viceroy but later learned Fremen ways and transformed himself into their messiah (thereby hijacking a prophecy seeded by the Bene Gesserit, centuries before). The opening story beats - which are crudely mashed in amongst the on-boarding screens for crafting and research - involve playable dream-visions of Fremen teachings. It seems likely that Awakening's lategame will feature a Fremen skilltree or two.

Still, I get the sense from interviews that Dune Awakening is less about refiguring the survival game as a narrative prop, and more a show of adherence to convention and boilerplate ideas about fun. The developers experimented with sandwalking, for example - the Fremen trick of dragging their feet to mimic the settling dunes and so, avoid rousing the local sandworm. Fancy crouch-walking, you could sneeringly call it, but still, I love the idea of a 'stealth mechanic' that challenges you to step like a desert, to observe and follow the cadences of shifting sand. Funcom binned the functionality, however, because "it looked ridiculous, and it made you walk really slowly." Pooh!

Perhaps players will devise their own, janky equivalents for sandwalking as they learn to manipulate the worms, akin to bunny-hopping in shooters. Or perhaps Funcom will belatedly revisit the idea in the course of adding other features, like worm-riding. Or player-planted moisture seals. I am crossing my fingers, because while Awakening leaves me newly enthused for Dune - a fiction I haven't hitherto spent much time with - this is quite a frustrating adaptation so far. Like many a survival game before, it basically feels like an exercise in ruining its own world, colonising away all the things that make it intriguing.