Dune 2000 

by Westwood Studios  Reviewed by: Curtis Houghton  

Overview

The planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, is the sole location of the Spice Melange. Three great houses have come together to fight for control of Dune: noble House Atreides, insidious House Ordos, and evil House Harkonnen. The Emperor has decided that whichever House produces the most Spice will be given control over the entire planet. This will grant power and money, because the Spice must flow.

One of the current buzzwords in the gaming community is "real-time strategy," or RTS. Back in 1993, RTS was defined by the Westwood Studios game Dune II. The player could manage resources and fight against opponents that would react fairly realistically, without having to do things on a turn-by-turn basis. Dune II is extremely limited by today's standards, but it paved the way for other RTS games like Age of Empires and Starcraft. Dune II is one of those games that I would occasionally install, play for long hours, then forget about for a while. Six to eight months later, I'd reinstall it and play some more. My wife would say, "Didn't you just finish playing this game?" I'd say, "Yeah, but it's FUN! And this time I'm gonna try something new!" Once other RTS games started to hit the market, I found myself playing Dune II less and less often. One of my main complaints with Dune II was the fact that I couldn't play against any of my friends. We'd have a rousing fragfest of Doom 2 over modem or network, but I couldn't do the same thing with Dune II. This really bit.

So what is Dune 2000? Basically, it's Dune II with a makeover and some extra polish. Westwood either decided that the fans deserved to have the added thrill of the old 256-color Dune II revamped with 16-bit color and multiplayer capabilities, or they saw the chance of making more money by repackaging an old game and selling it again. There are many new features in Dune 2000, but there's still a lot of the old flavor and gameplay of Dune II. Could this be the best of both worlds?

Gameplay, Controls, Interface

All my experience is clouded by my knowledge of Dune II, and I have based my explanation of Dune 2000 on this experience. If you're familiar with Dune II, you can jump in and play Dune 2000 pretty much from the get-go.

There are three teams you can choose to play: Blue Atreides, Green Ordos or Red Harkonnen. Each House has its own flavor, history and attributes, but almost every building or fighting unit you can create in the game is identical from House to House. Mastering one House and its capabilities will get you 95% of the way to mastering the other two Houses and their capabilities. You just have to learn a few different nuances that separate them. This is, unfortunately, a drawback because it does decrease replayability for the sake of novelty. Also, if you're familiar with Command & Conquer, you will recognize the basic controls and interface because Dune 2000 was built with the C&C engine.

You start off with very basic units: individual troopers and armored trikes. With each new scenario, you get more buildings and better fighting units, from tanks to rocket launchers to even stronger defenses. Spice harvesting is the basis for each scenario, as it provides the funding for buildings and vehicles. You must achieve a specific goal in order to move on to the next scenario. The Harkonnen and Ordos scenarios are all variations on two themes: kill everyone, or harvest X amount of spice. Only the Atreides scenarios have goals with any additional depth: rescue hostages, or capture a specific building. It seemed that most of the creative work went into the Atreides side of the game.

There are several changes from the original Dune II. Multiplayer support has been added via modem/serial, over a LAN with IPX, or over the Internet with TCP/IP. It was great to be able to play with others, because the AI of the computer players was sadly lacking. However, not all changes are for the best. One common tactic I used in Dune II was to build multiple buildings so I could produce more than one unit at a time. But regardless of how many heavy factories I had, I could not produce more than one tank at a time in Dune 2000. As far as I could see, having multiple buildings did not aid me at all, other than as a backup if one was destroyed.

Graphics

The graphics have been updated to 16-bit color, although if you have a slower system or a video card that can't quite handle it, there is an 8-bit option available. While the isometric three-quarter view looks rather flat, it is an improvement over the top-down view of the original. The landscape looks very nice, and I could swear the cliff edges were taken from real images and nicely melded into place. There are games available with more exciting graphics, but since Dune 2000 was written with the C&C engine, it was limited to the graphics capabilities of that game.

One of the things that really make this an enjoyable game are the cut-scenes that kick off each level. It's apparent that a lot of quality time went into creating these, and they really set the stage. I found myself looking for a game cheat specifically so I could skip the levels and watch the videos in between. (Yeah, I know, I shouldn't have done that, but they were fun.) Westwood hired John Rhys-Davies to play the role of the Atreides Mentat, and he did a very nice job; his was the most enjoyable performance. The other cut-scenes were also very well-done, but they seemed to lack the extra plot writing that the scenes with Rhys-Davies evidenced. It seemed like the writers really spent their time working on House Atreides more than the others to create premium gameplay.

Audio

Dune II featured typical MIDI music, but it was easy on the ears. Dune 2000 jumped on that theme and expanded it, weaving a lot of the themes from the Dune movie soundtrack into the background audio. I never found myself distracted by the music while playing, which is frankly what you want from a RTS game. The quality of the explosions and the units talking are better than the original Dune II.

System Requirements

Windows 95/98, Pentium 90 MHz (133 MHz or better recommended), 16 MB RAM, 16-bit color video card (2 MB video RAM recommended), 4X CD-ROM drive, 60 MB hard drive space, mouse, 28.8 Kbps modem or better (for modem or Internet play), DirectSound-compatible sound card

Documentation

I was impressed by the documentation and its coverage of the forces and buildings available to the player. There are also good explanations of setting up multiplayer games. It isn't the most detailed documentation, but it is much better than many other games I've seen.

Bottom Line

Unless you are an avid Dune fan, I would not recommend purchasing this game. Some very good work was put into upgrading the original Dune II, but since Westwood based Dune 2000 on the older Command & Conquer engine, Dune 2000 was outdated the day it was released. I will probably dust this game off later this year and replay it to see if has the same hook that Dune II had. Other than that, it will sit on my shelf while I spend time with other games. I give Dune 2000 a score of 67. It has some very good points, but the drawbacks keep it from getting a better score.

Review Posted On 22 April 1999.