A by-the-numbers remake (DUNE 2000 (PC))

Member Name: Burning_Darkness

Product:	DUNE 2000 (PC)
Date:	08/08/09 (32 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tried-and-tested gameplay, pleasant visuals

Disadvantages: unoriginal, unimaginative, looked dated even upon its release

Back in the early 90s, back when the Command and Conquer series was just a twinkle in developer Westwood Studios' eye, the team released Dune 2, a seminal real time strategy game set in Frank Herbert's Dune universe that would act as a template for the Command and Conquer games and for the thousands of imitators that followed in the series' wake. Dune 2 had you playing as one of three Houses, the Atriedies, Harkonnen or Ordos, who were all fighting for control of Arrakis, a desert planet rich in Spice, a rare resource used as spaceship fuel. The game had you building windfarms to genereate electricity, barracks and vehicle factories to create troops and tanks, radar facilities to give you a tactical overview of the battleground and refineries and harvesters to collect the spice and turn it into credits, allowing you to keep on building and manufacturing. Much of the levels are made up of desert, and bases can only be set up on rocky outcrops, whilst vast Sandworms rove about under the desert surface, waiting to swallow up your units whole if allowed to get close enough. It was a revolutionary game at the time, and in 2000 Westwood decided to give it a new lease of life, with Dune 2000 acting as a stopgap release prior to the release of the more visually ambitious Emperor- Battle for Dune.

Dune 2000 is essentially just Dune 2 with improved graphics, playing in exactly the same way as its predecessor but with visuals that closely resemble the original command and conquer game. This is not necessarily such a bad thing, as Dune 2 has a charm that makes it still worth playing today, but sadly that charm is missing in Dune 2000, which feels more like a very lazy command and conquer mod than a standalone game in its own right. It adds nothing new to the series gameplay-wise, and feels like little more than a cash-in, with clearly very little thought or effort having gone into its development. It looks pleasant enough, although it is missing the magic of either the original Dune 2 or the original command and conquer. There are some features that were not present in the original other than the updated visuals, such as apart from some competent voice acting, reasonably entertaining cutscenes and the ability to select large groups of units at once, but other than that Dune 2 is a playable but rather bland RTS with very little to recommend it now that the game is nearly ten years old, especially given that it felt dated at the time of its release.

Summary: A sadly missed opportunity