Real-time strategy games are delivered in a variety of flavors. They can range from uncomplicated masterpieces like the Command & Conquer series, though not all gems, that are easy to pick up and go, or they can be as in-depth as an Age of Empires that requires a bit more panache and patience. Regardless of complication or difficulty, there is something for everyone when it comes to playing and enjoying an RTS game.
Now, let’s take a time travel trip back to the late 90s. A young and upcoming 190lbs Nathan Stevens is working in a Walden Software inside of Fayette Mall (Lexington, Kentucky) daydreaming about how the world is his oyster and he can run anything on his PC thanks to the acquisition of 8 MB of RAM, and he intends on doing so that particular weekend with a new game. By the way, yes, that’s ‘mb’ and not ‘gb’. Continuing, he is strapped for cash because his job only pays him $5.25 an hour, but he can make up the cashflow shortfall when he works the weekend shifts at Suncoast and the Coffee Beanery (didn’t everyone have three jobs while attending college full-time? No? Just me? Eh.). While he doesn’t want to splurge and pick something for the maximum price ($39.95) on the shelves of WS, he wants something that will entertain him and ‘fly’ on his new RAM’d machine. And so, he chooses Dune 2000 off the $9.99 spinning CD shelf by the counter. His reasoning? Dune seems cool and I want that Command & Conquer happy fun time without the cost of a C&C game.
That game, while somewhat of a rip-off of Command & Conquer, ended up being worth its weight in gold. It was a simple game that included houses from Frank Herbert’s famed sci-fi novels, and gameplay design-wise made sense when digging spice, fighting off invaders, and building a powerful house were the driving points. It was so damn good and checked all the RTS boxes. All for $9.99.
Ah, the memories. To this day, I have never forgotten that experience. Everything else Dune-related, sans the books and the most recent movie, was forgettable. But that game, not so much.
Fast-forward 25 years later, and I’m reunited with an RTS version of Dune called Dune Spice Wars. This time around, the game goes deep into the weeds with ‘real-time strategy’ and not just building up troops and fighting off rival houses. It was everything a fan of the book series and movies could hope for in a game translation. This is one of the deepest RTS experiences I have had in my lifetime, and it all plays perfectly with what makes the novels and movies special.
So, get that sand thumper set, wake that sleeper, and let’s get this review started.
Gameplay as deep as a sand dune
Dune: Spice Wars borrows from Frank Herbert’s series that features heavy world-building details and disguises itself through Denis Villeneuve’s film vision. It mixes film familiarity with details from the novel which equals incredibly intricate decision-making that makes for one of the more all-encompassing and engaging RTS experiences. While the younger me was expecting more of the same that he experienced with Dune 2000, the adult me was glad that Dune: Spice Wars featured the dirty details of political power grabs and life-or-death decision-making.
Starting with those dirty details, the game puts you in the scrum of making well-informed decisions. The first decision you make is what house you’re going to represent. There are six houses to choose from, though I’m sure you can guess three of them. Yes, there are the Atreides, honorable as they are powerful. The Harkonnens are featured as well, nasty as they are greedy. There are Smugglers, which are defined perfectly by their name. There are also the Fremen who are native to Arrakis and are fierce warriors that have a better understanding of the spice-laden planet than anyone else. There is also the Corrino, a power-hungry house that uses others as chess pieces while sitting upon their thrones looking downward. And finally, there is the Ecaz, a surprisingly powerful house that is driven by art, recreational drugs, and taking advantage of other houses when the time calls.
Once you choose which house you want to represent during gameplay, you’re provided with faction bonuses, which can give you advantages right out of the gate, small restrictions that you have to follow, and hegemony goals during the game that allow for a ‘bit more’ in your overall rule. I found myself stuck for a while trying to figure out which house I should be supporting. Knowing what the bonuses of each were and figuring out how to use those to my gameplay advantage was a tougher decision than I expected. The fact that you must think before you even begin the game was a tipoff of what was to come from this Dune experience. Ultimately, I chose the Fremen, as I admire their concept of hard work, loyalty, bond with nature, and their undying religious beliefs that trump their need for power. The folks at Shiro Games didn’t waste an ounce of time bringing gamers a game that would most certainly make any Frank Herbert fan thrilled. Right out of the gate with house choice, and what that meant ultimately for the overall experience and game type, showed at the forefront that this game was going to be a deep and engrossing gameplay design.
Anyway, once the house is chosen, and you pick your representatives (two) to be the face of your house, the action begins. Immediately, you’re thrown onto Arrakis, where the first step you need to make is launching an ornithopter and patrolling and discovering what is around you. Once settlements are discovered, the game wants you to drum up some troops and go take over some settlements to build your empire. Troops come in a variety of flavors, you have the grunts, infiltrators, and then the heavy arms. The cheapest and easiest to use are the former, and taking over settlements is as easy as circling the grunts, right-clicking on where you want them to go, and then just simply approaching the small cities to set off the militia that guards them. The more troops you have, the better and easier it is to take over a settlement. This is common practice for any RTS game.
As you progress through the game, you can improve the abilities and attributes of your soldiers, which means you can send less to battle because their offense and defense are built up. Typically, at least in my shallow experience of the RTS genre, individual intricates of certain types of troops are not something that shows up, at least on this scale. It creates motivation and a need for balance when considering troop cost versus power gained. It’s a well-designed piece of the overall game’s strategy that might seem minor, but it goes a long way, especially when you see what else is in store for you in the game.
After conquering those settlements, you can either take them over and make them your own or you can pillage them and burn them to the ground. While the game allows you, at least at the start, to take control over as many settlements as you want, the number you can have directly relates to what you can afford. The game will remind you of this on occasion by ghosting out the flag icon that represents taking control of the town. If you’re strapped for cash, then pillaging is the best option with the settlements, even if it seems cruel.
Either direction you decide to go with settlements takes a certain amount of time to complete. I would like to think the Fremen are good people not initially wanting to kill every man, woman, or child, so re-settling the towns under the Fremen rule was preferred. At the same time, when I needed some cash to expand my empire, create more troops, or build more structures, I was emotionally okay with burning that shit to the ground. The simple choice to do either/or was nice, as it provided some strategy for the entire conquering process.
Now, should you choose to conquer, there are some things you must be aware of during gameplay. The game requires you to take care of your city and its residents, so that might mean building dew catchers or wind trappers. It also might mean pouring money into creating science or military opportunities, building out spice silos, and other ways to gather goods. Regardless, these are choices that help the overall strength of the house or could hinder you and make you less powerful. Just depends on your situation and how you listen to the people of the settlements and how you develop directions for those places to go.
Taking over settlements also means adding militia into the mix that guard them and make sure that no one else invades the land, or at the very least provide you with time to move troops over to help. What you can build out and what you can do to make sure that your cities are guarded well solely depends on your success in all the decisions you make for the city, as well as the choices you make for your overall house. One balances out the other and provides choices for direction. Again, this game can be incredibly complicated with details, which might be too much for some just wanting to have watered-down fun. I know when I first loaded up the game, I was just looking to conquer, dig for spice, and have battles. If the game met that trio of expectations, I would have been more than happy. But in this one little conquering moment, it showed that the gameplay design had no interest in making the experience simple, rather it was more serious than just a throwaway book/movie license.
The serious details of this gameplay start to rear their heads as your kingdom gets bigger and deeper. As you progress, tiny icons begin to appear in the upper part of the screen as you build out your house and begin to take control of the desert and its many settlements. These icons represent such things as building out your house with skills that could help in four different categories, such as getting to know the people of Arrakis better and their customs, military power, and brutality, and/or political panache. Essentially, you’re given a flowchart of how you want your house to grow and in what literal direction. The gameplay is extensive, so even this simple task of upgrading your house’s skill direction takes some thoughtful planning.
And the task icons will keep coming, as the game’s dirty details start to hit hard. Other icons will appear that allow you to choose which other house you’re supporting with political decisions. These decisions could be the Harkonnens wanting to do XYZ, or it could be that the Atreides want to do ABC. It could also be decisions about expanding and building out onto the desert. Regardless of voting topics, the fact that you have a say in the entire process, and that expands as you get more involved and more powerful, gives you even more hints on how complicated this game gets. What little details come out of your decisions here shift relationships in the game significantly.
And even more icons start to crop up. Some help you to assign emissaries to certain houses, where information can be gathered and used to your advantage. Still, other icons can take you to a Solari trade market, the best way to build out your house and allow you to purchase and sell Solari as its value moves up and down depending on actions on Arrakis. It’s insane what you can do in this game and how you can shift power back and forth through these minor movements and details. That’s impressive, but, again, all of it might be overwhelming to the player who simply wants an RTS experience that is command troops and conquer.
While I love all the details that Shiro Games poured their heart and soul into to make this an experience that Frank Herbert would probably play, I think the entire experience can be a bit much for the average RTS gamer. The problem with including too much in an interactive form of entertainment is that you can’t simply keep your user focused on one thing. It’s akin to having a huge buffet full of fantastically cooked food but taking attention away from any one specific item that you’re truly proud of having, and your customers can’t really enjoy it all at once because they don’t have the capacity. This is a wider audience problem for Dune: Spice Wars, where you’re not attracting anyone new to the series, rather you’re catering to that fanbase that is rabid for an accurate Dune world-building in a video game. Honestly, they achieved that book/movie-type of interactive experience here, but much like fans of Nintendo, if you’re catering to that one segmented group and trying to please them, what are you doing for everyone else? That’s the rub, especially with a movie/book-licensed game like this. If you don’t do enough, you lose that fanbase. If you do too much, you’re not catering to a wider audience. The movies are going through that right now. As brilliant as they are, they are not for everyone.
Now, having said this, I can guarantee you that below all those deep details lies the heart of a true RTS title that most of us are familiar with, so there is still the command and conquering aspect with strategy driving it all. You just must take time to understand how the game works and how it balances the gameplay experience with the simplicity of the command and conquering. It will certainly take some time and some effort to get to that place where you fully get the scope of what the devs were trying to accomplish. Hell, you might end up reading the novels because of the game, if you haven’t yet.
All this said, Dune: Spice Wars is an amazing experience. It captures the true essence of Herbert’s series and brings to life the houses that just recently have been magnified and shaped properly on the silver screen. The game is so much more than I was expecting and while overwhelming at times, the gameplay is respectfully and beautifully thought through to provide a healthy challenge for someone looking for a complicated RTS experience. Juggling so many different pieces and parts while trying to create a balance and progress power to conquer everything you can within an expansive Arrakis is like no other Dune experience to this point. It beats the hell out of what a movie can deliver and certainly leaves a great, yet simple game like Dune 2000 in its wake. Just simply understand that this game is detailed to the point where you truly must think like an actual leader and take care of a lot of loose ends to be successful. And we’re talking about shag carpet type of loose ends that hang everywhere. It’s a long haul rather than a short experience. If you’re up for that type of gameplay, then you’re in for a treat.
RTS Presentation
Let’s be honest, most of what you see and get with RTS games on the visual side of the tracks is finite in its presentation. The most you can hope for when judging graphical prowess in the RTS genre is automatic moving characters and reactions/happenings around you while you move back and forth across maps. Now, you probably wouldn’t think that Dune: Spice Wars, which is based on a desert planet, would contain many visually appealing parts, but you would be mistaken. There are plenty of things going on during gameplay that will help you fall into the world of Arrakis. The map is generally active with details like weather storms that randomly move in, enemies that cross great distances to raid settlements, and artifacts and wartime leftovers that are scattered and discovered as you progress. Visually, everything not a trooper is unique and artsy. The troops are very vanilla in their design, but the rest of the game, especially when you get a good view of the world, is visually stunning. The weather storms are some of the coolest visual happenings on Arrakis, as they roll in with electricity and cover/gum up whatever is in their path (including troops). While maybe not as pretty as a CIV or Age of Empires game, it’s still gorgeous and stays within the boundaries of the content it runs from.
Console version
While most of what you read is a direct pull from my PC review, as the game hasn’t changed that much in its substance, the jump from PC to console was quite the leap. I must give it to developer Shiro Games for making all the above gameplay designs and complications accessible in the console version of the game. It probably was no small feat.
As you can guess, using a mouse and keyboard is preferred for this type of game. Playing an RTS is so much easier when using the right controls, as you can quickly choose items, troops, and upgrades with a mouse and keyboard setup. Now, having said that and praised the PC elitists out there who need justification for their continued plight to be the best gamers in the world, the console version isn’t some weird throwaway with bad controls.
Playing the console version of Dune: Spice Wars left me impressed by the devs efforts to make the controls easy to grasp thanks to the simplification of the control scheme’s layout. Most of what you choose with upgrading material is done by the directional pad and one-button execution. While typical color-coded choices in certain menus are there, the game does its best not to splatter control directions everywhere or take away from the ambiance and eloquence of the Dune theme going about its choice and on-screen options. The console controls are subtle, work quickly when you figure them out (there is a period where it’s a bit loosey-goosey initially on the first go around), and the scheme feels methodical in its layout and design. My only complaint? I wish highlighting multiple troops at once could easily be done on the controller. If it can, I haven’t found out how yet. It’s manageable, though.
On that note, let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Dune: Spice Wars from developer Shiro Games is the ultimate experience for any Dune fan looking for a well-designed and respectful translation of the sci-fi series into an RTS gaming form. It has all the intricate details and power moves that are featured in the books, while at the same time crafted to be a familiar real-time strategy experience at its forefront. The only downer is the amount of gameplay element juggling a casual RTS fan might have to do to enjoy the game, which could turn them off from playing it.
