The Battle of Dune has begun. Three houses, one of whom you must join as army commander, Atreides, Harkonnen and Ordos, must fight in order to occupy the land of Dune and win the war to control the spice.
I remember when I first played this game, I was completely blown away by the graphics, sound, difficulty and concepts present in the game. But really, the first thing that hit me was the voice of a woman saying “Dune, The Building Of A Dynasty”.
It was marvelous, as it was the first time I’ve heard a person’s voice in the opening of a game. Mind you, this was back in the day when we used .wav files, a 1 gigabyte hard drive (if not less), windows 3.1 and SoundBlaster pro was like “holy crap” material.
Game-play is wise, I really love it, although it is hard controlling large groups of units, it is relatively fun clicking multiple times to get a unit up to where you want, although the unit limit helps you from having too many units. The most important and useful thing in this game however, is its house “specials”, each house having a unique unit that can be produced, and a unique weapon/troops that can be dispatched(for
free) when you have a palace. Another thing is the star port, an absolutely wonderful creation, even to this day; I have not encountered any structure in any strategy game that is as useful and innovative as the star port.
Computer AI isn’t exactly like Einstein, but don’t let it fool you, I found it harder to finish than games like Command and Conquer and even Red Alert. Although the missions aren’t as dynamic, that is, the missions all pretty much require you to crush your enemies (isn’t that we love doing though?), it suddenly becomes clear that you’re not going to get through as easily as you thought. The computer loves to repair, and not only that, they somehow can pump out units faster than you can say “Toledo”, making it quite difficult for you to penetrate into their inner base without losing a whole lot of your army, if you don’t believe me, try it for yourself, what makes it harder is that the “click-and-drag-to-select-units” feature hasn’t been created yet.
Overall though, the game was extremely enjoyable, even playing the game 14 years after it first came out, from the opening movie to the end, I was all smiles and didn’t think it wasn’t worth playing once. Truly a classic that should be enjoyed by those who are into strategy games, and how strategy games have developed into what they are now, for this game, was truly a revolutionary creation.
