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

I was an hour into Dune when Spice Wars , came out. It made me nostalgic for old Westwood Dune games. The bright jewel tones and awkward vibes were a funny translation of [*******************************************************************************************************************************************************] David Lynch’s original Dune. The original Dune‘s vibrant jewel tones and awkward vibes made for an amusing translation of the 1984 David Lynch film adaptation. Dune II is widely considered the godfather of modern real-time strategy games, but it was also delightfully weird, and had a banging score by Frank Klepacki. 2001’s Emperor: Battle for Dune had great cutscenes starring Michael Dorn and Mike McShane, which elevated its delightfully gawky UI and visuals into a memorable part of early full-motion video game history.

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.

Generally speaking, Dune is a psychotic space parable full of god-worms, interstellar drugs, and neo-feudal brutality. 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. But it also means replicating the same tedious structures and systems that define 4X games, driving the imperative to literally explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.

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. Dune’s science fiction novel is important, but it ultimately tells the story of a white man about his feelings on what was most important: ecological issues, religion, and oil fifdoms. MENA and Muslim writers have other stories to tell beyond this western framework. Dune is a complex story with a lot to offer. It’s not surprising that the narrative of Dune was rewritten in an unironic colonial genre. 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. Many other Dune games included a narrative or concept that characterized your actions as serving the Empire. Spice Wars is straight to business. You can either start growing spice or you will die. 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 games have scientific, cultural, diplomatic, and military victories that depend on the methods you use to hit certain criteria. 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 have an espionage system that could potentially lead to a win. (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 difficulty of different spy operations, such as resource theft or weakening enemies units did not seem to have an impact. There are other win conditions than the Hegemony victory or the complete map being taken over. You can also hire nomadic water vendors to help spread propaganda, though that will still reward you with Hegemony.

Image: Shiro Games/Funcom via Polygon

For my first foray into Arrakis, I chose the Smugglers, led by Esmar Tuek. 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, who has always been somewhat in line with the Atreides but offers little friction against them, is not someone that I would have chosen to lead a major faction. The Fremen and their tanksy Fedaykin units were my favorite, and I enjoyed a more predictable experience with them than with the Atreides. There was lots of Harkonnen aggression as well as many more village rebellions that 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. It would be possible to make the informational trade windows more legible (particularly since other factions have trade proposals on a strict timer). The UI also doesn’t display key currency or resource numbers. If you don’t monitor units or villages and keep an eye on process wheels, it can be difficult to track “days”. (The time bar is set to the Dune AG calendar year system — “After Guild” — which is unintuitively difficult to read.) Although the game is still in its early access phase, there are many things that could be fixed.

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). It won’t immediately be obvious to laypeople why the Empire is crushing down on the planet. The game just starts.

It is also puzzling how the Fremen, an indigenous people with no canonical interest or knowledge of space politics, must appease their oppressors by using the same language as their colonizers and adopting the same acquisitive attitude that has taken over their planet. It is difficult to imagine playing with Fremen, as it means you have to work within the same colonial designs systems that House Atreides or House Harkonnen. This includes having the burden of paying Imperial taxes, and even voting in Landsraad in limited capacities. It’s not immersion at all, it is a fundamental misinterpretation of the Fremen’s existence.

Image: Shiro Games/Funcom via Polygon

Dune is an infinite well of eccentricities, and every new project set in its universe has the exciting potential to get weird with the source material. Spice Wars leaves out all the creative possibilities to discover the most compelling aspects of the Dune universe. 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 you enjoy losing at Civ, and I’ll call you a liar.) My main problem is that Spice Wars doesn’t seem to really understand why it’s a Dune game or what makes Dune settings so compelling.

Anyway, who plays 4X games for nuance? I’m here to watch Arrakis burn.

Dune: Spice Wars will be released in early access on April 26 on Windows PC. The game was played on Windows PC using a pre-release download code provided by Shiro Games and Funcom. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.