Dune: Spice Wars review: a compulsive 4X that both nails and wastes its source material

This realtime 4X makes great use of Dune’s furniture in crafting a compulsive, busy, and well-made strategy game, and its new campaign is a great addition. But the soul of Dune remains elusive, leaving its desert planet feeling barren in the wrong ways.

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This buffet of different resources is key to what makes Spice Wars interesting. You’ll go into each match or mission with a game plan. Which flavour of control do I fancy today? Generally, this means focusing your techs and bonuses on a couple of resources while trying not to cripple your economy in other areas. Done right, all those tiny flaps of a baby steamroller’s wings will cascade into some sort of steam-nado before long, allowing you to pancake your foes with the sheer power of multipliers. Now, certain houses favour specific plays, and some resources are easy to trade for, stripping the risk from negelecting them, but there’s otherwise a decent amount of freedom. Spice Wars’ AI isn’t an especially tricky opponent, but cascading jenga towers of choices do make for some satisfying plays, especially now tweaks have made a relatively barren mid-game feel much richer.

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