Dune: Spice Wars

Dune: Spice Wars is the latest game based on the popular sci-fi franchise. It is great timing too as the fantastic movie is still fresh in people’s minds. This as most Dune games tend to be is a strategy game and it looks like it could be the most in-depth one based on the Dune franchise that we have seen yet. While it is an “early access” game so it is not yet officially released as I write this, I wanted to take a look at some of the main features the game has to offer to hopefully get some of you guys more excited about the game.

In The House

I really like how they are trying to be as faithful to the source material as possible with Dune: Spice Wars. As the title suggests, it is all about controlling spice, who controls the spice, controls the universe. The game will allow you to pick from one of four different factions. So far, we know that you can play as Duke Leto from House Atreides and Baron Vladimir from House Harkonnen. On the official page, they have two more house/character spots, but they are blacked out. I do actually hope that they manage to have some kind of movie tie-in thing going on when the game is fully complete.

Controlling The Spice

You do actually have a lot of freedom in regards to how you go about things in Dune: Spice Wars. Each faction is going to have its own way of doing things, but at the end of the day, if you want to force people into doing what you want through brute force you can. You can be sly and all political about it, or you could even try and find diplomatic ways to ensure your house is the one that flourishes. I think this is going to make the game very deep as far as the gameplay goes. Dealing with certain factions is sure to require more finesse than dealing with others and this is the kind of thing that I find pretty fun.

Taking More And More

They are saying that Dune: Spice Wars is a 4X grand strategy game so that means there is sure to be a real learning curve and a lot to keep up with thin this game. One of the things I am most interested in is the way you can explore Arrakis with ornithopters to find things that can help you out such as more supplies, villages, and other cool stuff. Of course, the more you expand, the more likely you are to run into those big SOB sandworms!

Pros:

• It is trying to be very faithful to the source material
• You can play as one of the four houses
• I like how you can explore the planet
• The gameplay is deep and it looks to be very rewarding

Cons:

• Games like this do tend to have a fairly big learning curve
• So far, I have not seen anything that ties it into the recent movie