If nothing else, Dune: Spice Wars – out in early access tomorrow – definitely feels like reading Dune. Aside from a few, pretty limited tooltips (along the lines of “consider harvesting Spice” – yeah, no kidding), there’s no real tutorial in Spice Wars’ early access version, and so your first game will feel a lot like opening up Frank Herbert’s first chapter. What’s going on? Who’s this guy? What’s that mean? Did my ebook download some kind of bugged version that’s missing the first hundred pages?
Puncture that layer of surface cloud though and there is something good here. Not of the swelling gravity of Villeneuve’s film or the oddness of Lynch’s. And not of mythically all-spanning, political, religious, philosophical-and-everything-else nature of the books either, of course. And not something that’s likely to kick-start a platform-defining genre like Dune 2: Battle for Arrakis famously did with the RTS, back in 1992 either. But it’s good! And for early access, good is generally enough.
There are four factions to choose from, Atreides, Harkonnen, Smugglers and Fremen, and naturally just the one map of Arrakis. You’ll play as a faction leader, Duke Leto for Atreides for instance (no sight of young Paul), and then pick a couple of assistants from a small list of four, who effectively embody some faction passives but do nothing else that I can discover – it’s nice to have a little control there though, a bit like choosing a civilization and then one of multiple leaders within that, in Civ. After that, you’re away. You have one main base city that can defend itself well, and then there are a few dozen regions to fight over, each with a neutral village that must be captured for you to gain control, and most – but not all – with some kind of important resource attached.
