Emperor: Battle for Dune

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How does it play? Anyone who has played a modern RTS game already knows, and knows too well. The gameplay here is a reheated, surprisingly sloppier dose of Red Alert 2’s and the other Command and Conquer titles before it. On top of this it has been streamlined and simplified, and it turns out that it’s for the worse.

Attacking is a sloppy affair. With the terrible unit AI, the player is essentially forced to manually manage their unit squads in every battle, especially when attacking an enemy base. A big problem lies in the enemy units that the player units will automatically choose to attack if left to their own judgment. Large, hulking tanks that deal heavy damage will engage puny infantry units before going after the single enemy vehicle that is rolling over player infantry units with abandon. Anti-armor infantry, with their powerful ground cannons, will do the same while being annihilated in droves by a flame-thrower tank. Even ground vehicles with the ability to simply run over enemy infantry will remain stationary and fire at them with a gun, eventually being blown to bits by a simple foot squadron when it could have rolled over them in about two seconds. This is a problem because the “steam-rolling” ability is only given to the ground vehicles of the Atreides and Harkonen Houses, and it is one of the elements that balances the swift movement and strong shields of Ordos tanks. The point is that unit AI is terrible, forcing the player to micromanage nearly every skirmish. Although this isn’t such an issue in the single player campaign where a computer enemy relies on the same AI, in multi-player battles it can be a pain.

Thankfully Westwood has incorporated automated spice resource gathering so that more of the player’s attention can go towards fighting and unit management. When a refinery building is created, the player is gifted a small reserve of Harvesters (ground) and Carryalls (air) that mine the spice in tandem. In theory, since the gathering is automatic, the Carryalls shuttle the expensive Harvesters away from danger if they are under the threat of a worm attack or taking enemy fire. Unfortunately this doesn’t work because once more the AI fails to impress. I’ve seen many instances where a Carryall will simply drop a Harvester on a spice patch (when there are many others on the map) that happens to be in the middle of a large group of enemy units. Needless to say, the Harvester and Carryall are quickly lost in these situations. This happens too often, and it’s frustrating. Automation of resource gathering is a good concept, but the gathering unit behavior should have been better developed.

Despite these problems however, EBFD is well balanced across the distinct advantages that each faction possesses. Each requires a different strategy to utilize its particular advantage, such as the Atreides reliance on long-range attack, the Harkonen on pure force, and Ordos on swift movement and shield recharging. Learning to use each House well is not just an asset in knowing the strengths and weaknesses of units that an enemy may be using, but lends some replay value. A good EBFD player is an experienced and educated EBFD player. And still there is not so much variance that controlling a House for the first time is mind-boggling. The buildings for each group are identical in function, as are the unit development trees. Basically it’s not a matter of what a unit does, but its basic armor, attack power, speed, and range attributes that vary across the Houses. In addition the player has an opportunity to ally with two or three of the five sub-houses, which themselves grant an extra two units each. While not very consequential to the overall success or failure of a mission, getting to choose what additional forces are at your disposal is a nice freedom, though hardly an important one. In all the game has its significant AI issues but is balanced, quite accessible, and yes, fun all around. But with so much development experience in the genre behind it, I certainly expected something tighter and closer to flawless, especially since there are no real innovations here. It’s the same formula, but with few surprising quirks.

With the shift to fully 3D environments Westwood has created its most visually stunning RTS title yet. Every unit, building, and terrain landmark is polygonal. The texture work is clean, accurate, and simply spectacular. Features such as minor variances in ground depth are handled convincingly with some cleverly rendered textures, freeing up polygons that would have otherwise been used to render the complex landscape features of Arrakis. What’s left then in terms of actual height variance are two levels; a lower sand level and the upper rocky plateaus where building construction can take place. It’s a typical RTS convention that any fan of the genre is already familiar with. There are a few instances in the single player mode where battles take place on other planets, each with a completely different set of geographical and environmental characteristics, such as the Ordos ice planet and Harkonen wasteland. These help to alleviate the monotony of the Arrakis maps, which look more or less identical to each other and are where most of the single player action is set.

The units, while not overly complex in design, look good enough from the closest possible camera position that the game allows. The camera itself is intuitive and simple to control, but isn’t able to zoom in enough for certain tasks, most notably picking similar-looking individual infantry units out of a large grouping. On the good side, tanks have distinct parts and round gun barrels and infantry units sport semi-unique weapons and animations across the various classes, although more visual variation is needed from a functional standpoint. Simply watching droves of infantry, a tank battalion, and an air squad push on across the map towards an enemy base holds its own pleasure. All of this comes at a price however, and it’s in the form of some significant slowdown. More on this in a bit…

The game looks better at higher resolutions, but just fine at the lower, less system-taxing ones. Kudos goes to Westwood for making the visual excellence accessible to gamers with less than cutting edge systems. Is this the best-looking RTS game to date? No doubt. In a genre that isn’t necessarily thought of for pushing the graphical envelope, EBFD is a nice surprise.

The story portions unfold through live action cinemas ala the Command and Conquer series, and are acted well for the most part. One disappointment is that they aren’t well paced, with most occurring in between the first few missions of the campaign mode and not at all near the middle and last ones. It’s a shame because there is much effort put into recreating the world of Dune through decent acting, costumes, and backgrounds, but the story is lost in the erratic pacing of its presentation. One pleasant surprise for the Trekkies (or is it Trekkers?) out there is that the Duke Atreides is played by none other than Michael Dorn, whose role is Worf in the Next-Generation series and films.

The bar remains high in the sound department with clean and varied artillery, machine gun, and other weapon sounds. Each House sports it’s own unique music, best among these being the Harkonen rock-esque theme. All are decent though and compliment, though never overpower, the action quite well. The game features a healthy amount of speech both in-game and during the live action cinemas, and almost all is well spoken given a decent cast of actors. The audio design along with some gorgeous visuals represents the world of war on Arrakis better than any game before has.

I’ve run into some pretty significant technical issues over the course of playing. First, the game crashes to the desktop at seemingly random places, and has done so twice after winning a mission but before the post-mission statistics screen with a save option loads. I don’t need to elaborate on how frustrating this can be. A quick perusal of Westwood’s official EBFD message boards revealed that I’m not the only one who has had this problem, and in fact it seems to be a common one. Hopefully a patch will be released to fix this soon, as it is certainly a major issue. It doesn’t happen frequently enough to render the game unplayable, but I would advise saving often, even towards the end of a mission.

Secondly, there can be some significant slowdown at any resolution when lots of units are set into motion at once, and it seems to happen regardless of how powerful the system is. Of course there is often no need to mobilize such a quantity of units in order to be victorious, but decisively overwhelming the enemy can be so sweet. Thankfully, this one, like the game’s other issues, isn’t a breaker. It’s still an annoyance.

At this time I’ve not been able to try the online multi-player mode due to a beef that the Internet connection Gods must have with me. When I figure out what it is and make the appropriate sacrifices, I’ll write up a multi-player review. Let’s not kid ourselves here though; this is an RTS game with three balanced factions. It shouldn’t be too hard to imagine how it plays online. Without hearing any reports of Westwood’s online matching service, which the player is given free unlimited access to with a purchase of the game, being broken, it should be working smoothly. I’ll write up my personal experiences with it in a few days.

Do you dig the Dune story? Do you dig RTS games? If yes then this one is certainly worth a purchase. It’s solid and balanced, visually spectacular, offers a fairly easy though engaging single player campaign and skirmish mode, and is true (perhaps too true) to the common conventions of the genre. In this sense you already know what to expect. For first-time RTS players it’s a good introduction thanks to simplified unit handling and automatic resource gathering. Moronic AI, messy path finding, and some technical issues detract from an otherwise fun experience. But then there is plenty of fun leftover, which in the end is all that matters.