Dune: Spice Wars is for strategy die-hards more than Dune fans

digitaltrends.com:

As a recent Dune fan thanks to the recent film adaptation and a newbie to the world of real-time strategy games, I was excited to try out the new Dune: Spice Wars. I’ve seen the acclaim gained by the old Westwood Dune titles, so this fresh take on the series quickly grabbed my attention. Sadly, Spice Wars made me look to the past for a better introduction to the genre.

Dune Spice Wars is a 4x real-time strategy game that places players in control of one of the famous factions of the series: The Fremen, House Atreides, House Harkonnen, or the Smugglers. Each faction comes with their own special abilities. The main goal as the leader of one of these groups is to control the mining resources and use them and the profit economic power gained from them to become the strongest of the four sides.

The big problem when it comes to this is I had no idea how anything worked.

While I expected a real-time strategy to be complicated, I didn’t think the learning curve would come from the actual tutorial. There are so many pieces to the puzzle that I found myself wishing the text blocks were much more in-depth. The game expects you to quickly learn how to use your armies, what to do with your obtained assets, how to deal with other factions politically, how to satisfy the people of your faction, and how to pay your taxes (seriously) after barely going into detail on each mechanic. It really feels like the game is chasing the the dedicated RTS crowd, but its not friendly for newcomers hoping to hop in the genre through a fan-favorite IP.

I had to capture civilizations near spice farms, which is easier said than done. It involved sending out a recon drone maintained with spice and water, but those resources are crucial to keeping my