In a world where every person the player meets offers conversational tidbits like, "the Spice is life," and "the Spice must flow," you'd think that some one would have worked out a way for units to patrol alongside a harvester. Welcome back to the golden age of gaming.
Want to try and sneak around to a back entrance? Want to try and cross the sands on several different rocks instead of over open sand where you can be eaten by a giant worm? Then you'll have to hover over your units and guide them every step of the way. There is no option for players to set or use waypoints. To keep things simple, I'm going to pick on just three areas ¿ the lack of waypoints, the lack of any sort of escort option, and the horrible, horrible AI. If you play a lot of real-time games in a multi-player mode, you've probably already realized that there are a lot of features missing from the above list. It's almost exactly the same game Westwood released as their original Dune II. Does all of this sound familiar? It should. The whole structure is very simple and even the most basic strategy gamer should have no trouble at all sorting out what they're supposed to be doing. These single player missions are fairly well designed, and once completed offer gamers a couple of choices over which mission they're going to take on next. Like any other game, players receive a briefing at the beginning of the game, most of which involve mining a certain amount of spice or utterly eliminating an opponent, and then they go to the play screen to actually tackle it. Players have all the basic options that you'd expect from that era, from unit grouping and map location hot keys to a scatter hot key and a guard building option. In fact, the entire feel of the game is excellent which makes that much more disappointing that the game is so damn dated.įor the most part, Dune 2000 seems to be frozen in time somewhere around the release of Red Alert, which makes sense, seeing as that's the basic engine that the company used. All of the graphics within the game are similarly entertaining ¿ each of the different buildings and units looks exactly like you'd imagine it would. As the game continues, you'll be treated to movies that help push along the plot, which in the case of the Atreides and Harkonnen pretty much follows that of the books and movie, but with the Ordos actually offers up an entirely new race and story. All of the game's characters look as if they crawled straight off the set of Lynch's film, and the acting is superb throughout. For perhaps the first time in my life, I have to admit that I absolutely loved the FMV footage in this game. Dune 2000, while certainly better than its predecessor is lacking many of the features that are absolutely vital for a real-time strategy game to compete in today's market.įirst let's cover what's really cool about the game.
What I found instead was a title that seems to be outdated already. Knowing this, I was extremely eager to get my hands on Dune 2000, Westwood's remake of their early classic.
This new surge of releases added a great deal to the genre, from multiple unit selection, to waypoint control, and more recently, 3D units and terrain. Since then the real-time strategy world has taken off, first with Warcraft and Westwood's own follow-up Command & Conquer, and later with waves of rip-off titles. Unfortunately, that was a very long time ago. The units were well balanced, the missions helped players ease into this strange new world by teaching them the basic skills they'd need to survive. Not only did this classic introduce players to the real-time strategy game, but it also managed to deliver all of the feel of Herbert's Dune universe in the process. Dune II was one of the greatest games of all time.
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