Set in the sci-fi world Dune, created by Frank Herbert, Dune: Spice Wars is a brand-new 4X strategy game that allows you to explore the franchise like never before. The game takes a more serious and detailed approach to expanding and sustaining your faction while harvesting the rarest resource in the universe, the spice. Dune: Spice Wars is currently under development at Shiro Games however the publisher Funcom and developer have released the title in Early Access and will continue to develop the game with fan feedback. This is our preview of Dune: Spice Wars in which we harvest some spice and try not to get eaten by giant sandworms.
The Early Access release of Dune: Spice Wars comes with a sandbox mode that offers all four factions. After selecting your faction, you are also given the choice to pick two councilors but during my playthrough, I did not see any benefit of picking one over the other. This might be balanced in the upcoming builds but as of now, they do not do much apart from giving some active and passive bonuses. Apart from picking your faction and councilors, you can also choose various settings including map size, the difficulty of enemy factions, number of enemy factions, sandworm activity, the number of sandstorms happening on the map, and so on. Once you are ready, you can jump into the game with your desired settings.
The game offers you four factions to choose from. These include House Atreides, House Harkonnen, The Smugglers, and The Fremen. Each of these factions comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. Only The Fremen are native to the Arrakis, and they certainly benefit from it. Rest all three factions are not native to the planet and they must research accordingly in order to settle on the planet. No matter what faction you pick, the game plays out in a fairly straightforward manner. You start with a main city, and you must explore the map and look for villages to conquer.
These villages are defended by their local militia, which is fairly weak, but they can become a pain quickly with their small, hit-and-run type attacks in the long run. Your first phase is always the exploration, but you do not have to explore yourself. When you start the game, you have your Ornithopters which come with a self-explore option. You just turn it on, and it will continue to explore the map, marking important points-on-interests and villages around your map while you build up your armies and start taking over villages. Apart from the villages, the points-of-interest will give you two options to explore them where you can send your armies, Ornithopters, or an agent to resolve them and collect a reward which could be a resource, unit, or other benefits.
Once you have a few villages under your control, you can start building new buildings in these villages. Each village can only have a certain number of structures for free however you can pay additional Plascrete to increase building slots. Even then, you can only construct one type of building only once in a building. These structures fall into three categories which include Economy, Military, and Statecraft. Based on your needs, you can build whatever you want and reap their benefits. You have to protect these villages since they become your expansion points and they determine your faction’s global presence on the planet so enemy factions will always try to take them under their own control.
Important structures such as refineries to collect spice and silos to store additional spice can only be built in these villages. Once you create a refinery, you will get a harvester that can collect spice from spice fields. However, these are high-risk locations since once the harvester starts collecting spice, it will also attract the behemoth sandworms which emerge from the ground and can swallow the whole harvester along with its crew. Every time a sandworm is sighted, the game notifies you and you must act quickly in order to save your harvesters and armies. Apart from harvesters, your armies moving around the sands of Arrakis are also at the constant threat of these sandworms.
As you move around to take over villages and check out various points-of-interests, the movement of your armies attracts sandworms and if they are caught in their mouths, they are instantly killed. Only The Fremen faction can move freely around the sand dunes without attracting the giant sandworms. Each village also has certain bonus reserves around them so constructing a resource collector belonging to that reserve type grants you bonus resources as well. Resources are vital and scarce in Dune: Spice Wars and you must go for every bonus reserve before if you are too slow, your opposing factions will get to them first, become stronger and eventually annihilate you because Dune: Spice Wars is all about survival. Dune: Spice Wars has its own set of resources that you must collect in order to ensure that you have plenty to expand, provide for your faction, and keep a powerful political profile at the Landstraad as well. Your authority dictates your control over a region, and you have to spend it to take over villages.
Apart from collecting Spice and Plascrete which are used for building constructions, you also have to collect water is used to control the villages under your command. If you run out of water, your villages will rally against you, and it is not something that you can afford in a game like Dune: Spice Wars. Manpower is one of the key resources in the game because you have to build your armies and the crew for your machines. All of them require manpower and you can increase your manpower by having military structures in villages. You can also generate additional fuel cells which power up your villages, and main city along with your machinery. These are all of the resources that you will need for your villages, forces, survival, and many other aspects.
Apart from these mainstream resources, two additional resources that you have in Dune: Spice Wars include Solari and Landstraad Standing. Solari is the official currency of Imperium, and you can sell your spice for Solari. Imperium also charges you tax which you have to pay in the form of spice otherwise your faction is sanctioned if you fail to pay your taxes every month. If you want to sell your spice for Solari, you can sell it directly to CHOAM however you can also refuse to sell when the price is low but when the price goes up, you can sell your spice for an additional profit. The price changes when the taxes are paid so you can stockpile your spice until you feel that the price is right to sell for maximum profits.
Finally, you have your Landstraad Council points which is your political strength, and show your standing within the council. The more points you have, the more powerful your position becomes in the Landstraad Council. After 20 days, you can vote in the council to pass or reject resolutions, and the more powerful you are, the more influence you have here. By this, you can temporarily modify the rules of the game however this is for a limited time only, and sometimes, all of the AI players rally against you so you have to be very careful with this. The more tax you pay, the higher your authority here gets as well as the Imperium will be tilted in your favor.
The final trick up your sleeve is espionage and Dune: Spice Wars is pretty good at it. After every few days, you get access to a new agent and you can assign these agents to spy on your rival factions, and collect more intel about the planet and even the Landstraad Council. You can assign an agent to a field and as you continue to gain intel, your agents will level up and if they keep at it, they will start to uncover valuable and hidden secrets that will give you a massive advantage to tilt the balance in your favor. You will also need to assign some agents to counterspy because just like you, your rivals are always spying on you as well.
The sandbox mode in Dune: Spice Wars gives you the freedom of choosing your own path to victory. By default, there are three ways to get victory in the game and you can work towards any of them. You can work towards global domination which is the most traditional way of victory as you fight and destroy your opposing factions or simply assassinate their leader. This sends the faction into chaos and they are defeated. If you want to make your moves across various aspects, you can go for the Hegemony win which includes you having 5,000 Hegemony points which are gained from various actions such as collecting spice, controlling villages, and other actions in the game.
Finally, if you prefer politics and want to win over the planet politically, you can go for the Governorship victory which is basically a charter in the Landstraad Council. Charters are special resolutions that must be voted by a specific number of factions to be elected. For this, you must have powerful allies that can vote for you during the voting and if you have the strength you need to be chosen as the leader, you can issue a charter and if it gets voted in your favor, you are declared the legal ruler of the whole planet Arrakis. This leads to game victory as well.
Dune: Spice Wars is a beautiful game as well. The details of the planet Arrakis are beautifully made, and the smaller details look amazing. I was amazed to see how detailed both fog and the dusty dunes look and how much different they both look from each other despite being almost the same in appearance as mist and dusty trails. The units are designed pretty well and in other aspects of the world such as the sandworms, how the sand moves when they are moving around underground and the deadly sandstorms, everything looks beautiful. Each faction is unique, and its units are brilliantly detailed in their own way. The vehicles feel meaty in their own aspect. The sound design is pretty decent as well and fits really well with the game. At this point, there are no character animations or cutscenes in the game but then again this is just an early access release of the title and Shiro Games aims at adding more features and content to the game in the future.
The game certainly requires some balance throughout its formula which at this point, makes the game difficult for various reasons. For example, having an army in Dune: Spice Wars is a real challenge because their upcoming costs are a killer. For me, manpower was the hardest resource, and even collecting spice did not give me as much trouble that Manpower gave me. You need big armies to defend your villages as you expand your presence on Arrakis but managing resources, on the other hand, seems a little unfair at this point and this certainly needs more balancing. Apart from this, the Landstaad Council does not seem to do anything effective for your cause and most of the time I found everyone else simply voting against me despite everyone being at war. I am hoping to see an additional balancing of mechanics in upcoming updates.
In its Early Access release, Dune: Spice Wars feels like a complete game although the multiplayer aspect is missing at this point from the game along with any other game modes such as the main campaign or anything else. In my opinion, Dune: Spice Wars captures the Dune universe and presents it in the video game format perfectly even in its current condition. The game is challenging to play, satisfying to win, and beautiful to look at. Normally, I rarely visit Early Access releases after writing a review or a preview until they are fully launched however I am currently hooked to Dune: Spice Wars and I will continue to spend more time in the brilliant Sandbox mode it offers. I am also looking forward to what the developers add to the title leading to its full release. Dune: Spice Wars packs a huge potential, and I am eagerly waiting for more.
