Dune: Spice Wars impressions: a strategy adaptation with uneven results

A half hour later Dune: Spice Wars, I felt a nostalgic pang for the old Westwood Dune games, when the graphics were fun, the writing was campy, and things were stylized away from the real-world gravity of Frank Herbert’s books. Original Dune’s vibrant jewel tones and awkward vibes made for an amusing translation of the 1984 David Lynch film adaptation. Dune IIThis game is considered by many to be the foundation of real-time strategic games. But it was also a delightfully bizarre and sung well by Frank Klepacki. 2001’s Battle for DuneIt featured great scenes starring Mike McShane and Michael Dorn, making it a highlight of the early days of full-motion video games.

These games didn’t really dig deep into the real-world ugliness of Dune, because playing up the franchise’s weirdness, especially using the idiosyncrasies of old-school graphics, helped to soften Arrakis into a fantastical escape. Spice Wars — at least in its current early access state — breaks away from this stylish legacy to make an uncomplicated 4X real-time strategy game with uneven results.

Dune, in general, is a parable of psychotic space filled with god-worms and interstellar drugs as well as neofeudal violence. Paul Atreides is the most well-known character. He rises as a mesianic icon to become a ruler and then creates eons upon eons in tyranny. While many (including myself) consider Dune a cherished part of their youth, it doesn’t mean Herbert’s work is immune to a higher standard of criticism. For starters, Dune is often used as a lazy validation of alt-right viewpoints, sort of like fascists’ love of Warhammer 40k. With its story set around a coveted exotic resource — the spice melange, which powers interstellar travel — the Dune world seems a natural fit for a resource-mining game. However, it means replicating all the tedious systems and structures that are part of 4X games. It drives the desire to actually explore, extend, exploit, and kill.

Image: Shiro Games/Funcom via Polygon

There’s also a whole lot of orientalism inherent in Dune. Critic Roxana Hadadi pointed out that the latest film’s Fremen have been flattened into generic brown people, divorced from their roots in MENA and Islamic culture. “Dune has always been about more than just the desert, but Villeneuve’s Part One can’t see past the sand,” she wrote for Vulture. Spice Wars seems to take a similarly flat approach, though it wouldn’t be a better solution to put brown people (as opposed to mostly white developers) in charge of pigeonholing themselves into a predetermined setting. For all its significance as a work of science fiction, Dune is ultimately a white man’s story about what he felt was important at the time — ecological issues, oil fiefdoms, faith, extremism. MENA writers and Muslim authors have many other stories beyond the western one. Ultimately, Dune has a lot of cultural and historical baggage, and it’s odd to see the finer points of its narrative steamrolled in a genre that unironically uses colonial systems. A 4X Dune game in 2022 that follows a rote formula just isn’t that exciting, especially when it doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

Spice Wars’ main factions are House Atreides, House Harkonnen, the Smugglers, and the Fremen. Other Dune games did not have a lot of narrative preamble. This was because your actions on Arrakis were viewed as service to Empire. Spice WarsIt’s straight to the point: either start growing spice or you die trying. Every so often you’re presented with Landsraad business — the congress of Great Houses where House Atreides, ostensibly the house of velvet-gloved “diplomacy,” thrives. The idea is to amass as much Hegemony as possible — 30,000 is the standard mark — while paying the Imperial spice tax, voting on strategic resolutions, and fending off your neighbors.

4X games have fixed win conditions — for instance, Civilization There are many ways to win in games. These include diplomatic, military, scientific and cultural wins. Civ players who don’t want to fight can use insidious forms of cultural imperialism (music, art, and so on) to get a culture victory. There don’t seem to be direct parallels to these types of scenarios in Spice Wars But it does contain an espionage mechanism that could lead to a victory. (I didn’t have the chance to find out.) It feels a little undercooked right now — each agent can have special traits (like “Psychologist”) but these didn’t seem to have a major effect. The difficulties between spy operations such as resource theft and weakening of enemy units didn’t seem to matter. I’m not sure what other win conditions there are besides the standard Hegemony victory, or taking over the entire map, which would ostensibly be a military victory; you can hire nomadic water sellers to spread propaganda for you, but that still rewards you with Hegemony.

Image: Shiro Games/Funcom via Polygon

The Smugglers led by Esmar Tek was my choice for my first venture into Arrakis. The voice acting for some of the units is comically jarring — I recognized the desire to emulate the breathy tones of the Dune II voiceover lady, but my thopter pilot’s slight slurring just doesn’t work. The Smugglers’ abilities skew towards subterfuge and black market manipulation, and I ended up ditching them in search of a more immediately gratifying approach. Esmar Tuek is honestly not someone I’d have picked to head up a major faction — he’s always been somewhat aligned with the Atreides and offers no real sense of friction when pitted against them. The Fremen and their tanksy Fedaykin units were my favorite, and I enjoyed a more predictable experience with the Atreides (lots Harkonnen aggressions and many, much more village revolts than the Fremen).

Again, this is minor, but the voice acting, and small grammatical missteps (“Fremens” and “stuffs”), are all over the place, including some real out-of-pocket written dialogue where Baron Harkonnen talks about seeing your troops “roaming before [his] yard.” Ornithopter autopiloting also flatlines after a certain point — you have to repeatedly nudge them to investigate points of interest, and they don’t seem to act when new ones spawn over time. The informational trade windows could be tweaked for better legibility (especially since trade proposals from other factions are on a tight timer), and the UI doesn’t clearly display some key currencies or resources. It’s also not easy to keep track of “days” passing unless you monitor individual units, villages, and process wheels for ongoing objectives. (The time bar is set to the Dune AG calendar year system — “After Guild” — which is unintuitively difficult to read.) Although the game is currently in early access, there are many issues that could be corrected.

Right now Spice Wars offers no real narrative dressing tackling why you’re on Arrakis in the first place — possibly because it assumes you’re coming in hot from the films, or books, and don’t need exposition. Perhaps Shiro Games plans to add a contextual intro movie or the like, to set the tone for the campaigns (even Dune II’s intro had a few seconds of the Emperor to establish the imperial mandate). As of now, it won’t be immediately clear to the layperson why the Empire is cracking down on the planet — the game simply starts.

It is also perplexing how the Fremen — an indigenous people who have no canonical interest in space politics — must placate their oppressors using the same language and acquisitive attitudes that have taken hold of their planet. Playing with the Fremen means working within the same colonial design systems as House Atreides and House Harkonnen — grinding to pay Imperial taxes and voting in the Landsraad, even in a limited capacity, just doesn’t make sense. Not only is it the opposite of immersion, but it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of why the Fremen exist.

Image: Shiro Games/Funcom via Polygon

Dune has an endless supply of bizarreness, so every project in the universe is bound to have the potential for getting weirder with its source material. Spice WarsThis leaves out the chance to discover the most interesting parts of Dune’s world. For every rote portrayal of an ambitious Great House which seeks spice and glory, we’re deprived of something new — perhaps a rogue branch of the Bene Gesserit, or an end-game scenario where the Fremen gain insurrectional abilities. This isn’t just a matter of reimagining win conditions, balancing the development (technology) trees, or improving faction characterization — it goes back to the wider, messier problem of how the developers approached the finer points of Dune.

I’m sure some of these issues can be solved with patches and DLC, and I hope that Shiro will continue to deepen mid- and late-game gameplay. Visually, the mid-00s cartoonish vibe sort of works — the environments and desert palettes are quite lovely, and I’m a fan of the easy zoom/scroll features on the map. It’s always fun to watch invaders get deleted by a sandstorm (or a sandworm). But on a wider thematic level, it’s difficult to imagine that the final product will be drastically different when it leaves early access, and it’s unreasonable to expect Spice Wars to get too experimental within the conventions of the 4X genre — most strategy fans are drawn to these kinds of games for the heady rush of conquest, with all its attendant struggles. Tell me if you like losing. Civ, and I’ll call you a liar.) That is my biggest problem. Spice Wars doesn’t really seem to understand why it’s a Dune game, or even what makes a Dune setting compelling in the first place.

But, I don’t know anyone who would play 4X nuance games. I’m here to watch Arrakis burn.

Dune: Spice Wars Windows PC users will have early access to the game on April 26, 2016. It was downloaded using the pre-release code from Shiro Games. Vox Media is an affiliate partner. Although these partnerships do not impact editorial content, Vox Media could earn commissions on products bought via affiliate links. Here are some links to help you find. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.