Back to the Desert

Westwood Studio's first effort in the RTS genre, Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, was a seminal title for that genre. It wasn't the first real-time strategy game ever made, but it basically introduced (and cemented) all the major elements that would make the genre what it is today. Resource gathering, resource management, build times, training soldiers, building units, all the way to the end game and the ways you could win, that all came from Dune II. It was a success upon release, but the inspiration it gave to Westwood Studios was even more important as this game very directly paved the way for the whole of the Command & Conquer series.

The first Command & Conquer went on to birth four sequels, and even more expansion, but the time the year 2000 came into view. Titles were constantly being pumped out in that series from 1995 on, and the market-share for Command & Conquer was only growing as the series itself expanded and refined everything that came before. Thus, but the year 2000 the series hardly resembled Dune II except in the most basic of concepts. You could see where the series came from but the major differences were night and day. Command & Conquer was light and agile. Dune II was plodding and slow.

It makes sense, then, that Westwood would want to revisit the game that essentially launched their entire RTS formula. In 2000 the studio, working with production house Intelligent Games, released Dune 2000. A reworking and re-imagining of the original game, this is more than just a remaster for (at the time) modern systems. It's a full re-engineering of the game, from the ground up, based on Westwood's then-current engine. It feels and plays like a Command & Conquer game, just with all the trappings of Dune instead. For fans of the original PC game, this must have felt like the best of both worlds even if the ends result was still outclassed by Westwood's on proprietary franchise.

If you've played Dune II then the basics of Dune 2000 will seem quite familiar. You choose one of the three main houses of the galaxy -- Atredeis, Harkonnen, or Ordos -- and work to take over all of Arakkis from the other two. Why? Because Spice, the substance that grows naturally in the deserts of Arakkis and can be used to power all of the technology in the cosmos (and it's also a solid party drug). He who controls the spice controls the universe, as they say. So you take your armies to the planet and, zone by zone, go through the standard RTS loop: build harvesters, gather spice, build soldiers, attack the other armies, rinse and repeat.

Much of what made the original game interesting is here in Dune 2000, just refined. You're still harvesting spice, getting money, slapping down concrete, building your bases, and attacking the others, but now everything is smoother. The characters move faster, the resources gather far more quickly, and the battles are fast and satisfying. Compared to the plodding pace of the original, this new version is quick, lithe, and does everything you want from an RTS game of the era. If all you wanted was to see what Dune II could be, this game delivers that.

Beyond that, it adds in quality of life features from the other Westwood games to really expand the play loop. Now you don't just make soldiers but you can also train rocket soldiers, with higher damager-per-second, and engineers, who can take over other buildings. This allows you to start building new bases are other locations (since all it takes to build one building is to have another nearby). You can also build (or have delivered) new trucks that can plunk a base down anywhere. Instant second HQ at the tip of your fingers.

The additional of a space port actually adds a lot more, too. Now, when you have too much money, you can invest it in instant units with the click of a couple of buttons. It's faster and easier to buy them than build them, and that's a good place to invest all the money you'll get. And you will get a lot of money as the game features expansive maps with plenty of space in the sands, and you can have so many harvesters going that your economy is absolutely going to zip along. If you aren't constantly buying ships in the later missions you need to rethink your economy (and will likely lose to the A.I.).

I felt the game play loop was fun, and better yet, I found the A.I. to be more interesting and more challenging. Supposedly the A.I. in Dune II was supposed to be more robust but coding errors kept it from really being a challenge to the players. This game has much better A.I. that can really mob you if you're not ready. This kind of challenge is appreciated, especially as you play through each campaign and see similar missions, set up similar ways. If the A.I. couldn't pose a challenge on your third time through the game would get very boring.

With that said, the repetitive nature of the game does hold it back some. Because each house has similar missions in similar structures, you end up feeling like you're doing the same loop over and over again. Each round of missions can be four hours, but it's a very same-y four hours. Even at the end game, when you finally get some units that are specific to your house and no one else's, it still feels like you're doing much the same for each House. Same loop, different colors. More and varied missions to really make Atredeis different from Ordos, different from Harkonnen, would have been appreciated.

If we're on the topic of everything feeling repetitive, the game really needed more design variance, both in its graphics and sound. While each house has a different voice assistant talking to you the whole time, they all say the same lines, so you'll hear the same things over and over again. And you'll hear them a lot because the voice assistants are constantly talking. they seriously won't shut up. It's not like they're saying anything too helpful -- "unit ready", "unit lost", "our base is under attack" over and over -- because they don't tell you when or what or how. A blinking light on the map would be more useful than the constant, repetitive patter from the computer.

And while I know Arakkis is all sand, all the time, could we please have gotten some variations on that or something. Every map looks the same -- yellow sand, slightly darker rocks, reddish spice -- in every region of the game. Other games in the genre offer icy areas, or woody areas, or just more rocky areas. Yes, Arakkis is a desert planet but it has to have ice at the poles, or maybe some mountainous terrain. And even if you can't change up the terrains could you just do slightly different colors. Orange sand, tan sand, cream sand. Anything to breakup all the same colors all the same times every mission. Any variance would have been better than this.

I say all this because Dune 2000 is a longer game the original with bigger maps, more missions, and a longer play time for each house. It's at least 12 hours you'll spend at the game, listening to the same lines and seeing the same terrain over and over again. It's a lot, and the designers should have gone with a little less fidelity to the original title and a little more vibrance to work with. I get why they didn't, but that doesn't mean the game benefits from their desires.

Still, these minor flaws don't ruin the experience overall. I liked Dune 2000 and do rate it higher than the original Dune II. It is everything I wanted from the original, just improved. Warts and all, it's a fun game that sucked me in for a few hours. And for someone that doesn't even care about the Dune franchise, that's impressive enough on its own.