The name of this game's soundtrack says it all: "Spice Opera".
SANDY
To those not familiar with the subject matter, "Dune" is a science fiction novel by Frank Herbert which explores the distant future, a galaxy ruled by various factions of humans in an almost feudalistic system, with a powerful emperor at the top of the pyramid and many houses of noble families keeping him in check. The entire culture revolves around a substance called the "Spice Melange", which enables space travel and bestows unnatural powers of the mind. Unfortunately, the only place where this Spice can be acquired is a remote planet called Dune, an extremely inhospitable desert world where not a single drop of rain falls, EVER. It just so happens that the Atreides family has recently been granted the rights to go mine Spice on Dune, an extremely lucrative venture which could place them at the front of galactic affairs. However, they have been given Dune out of the hands of their most hated enemies, the Harkonnen, who have vowed to destroy them no matter the cost, and will stop at nothing.
The Dune universe is far more elaborate than that short paragraph could possibly cover. Still, this short premise is pretty much all you will need to know to play the game, as everything else you might need would be explained to you during play. As Paul Atreides, the young (and only) heir of the Atreides family, you will face the challenges that await you on Dune as you try to fulfill your mining contract while waging a terrible and bloody war against your sworn Harkonnen enemy, in the fight for survival, prestige, and eventually even spiritual ascension.
DUNE, RIPE FOR ADVENTURE AND BUILT FOR STRATEGY!
The game itself is a curious mix between a questlike adventure and a strategic management game. You will be spending roughly equal time following the plot as applying your strategic forces around the planet. For the most part, Cryo managed to keep these two seemingly incompatible pieces working exceptionally neatly together - neither will likely interfere with the other, at least not until the later game (where management becomes more time consuming, although definitely not too tedious).
The quest part of the game is played in first-person, placing you in the eyes of Paul Atreides. You'll wander through the Atreides' palace on Arakeen, meeting the many colorful characters from the novel. There is your father, the Duke, solemn but ever breaming with advice. Your mother is a witch (yeah, kind of) and has a great deal to teach you as the game progresses. A plethora of advisors will alert you to threats and developments, and some could even accompany you as you leave the palace and wander in the vast desert.
You will take an ornithopter for flights across the surface of the barren world, where you will find many settlements of "Fremen", the natives of Dune, a harsh people but nonetheless hardworking and extremely loyal. Your first task will be to convince them to work for you in extracting the spice from the few territories under your control. Once you get a few troops of fremen working, the management game will begin to take shape. You'll have to find or buy equipment for them to increase their effectiveness, including great harvester vehicles to sift the spice out of the sand dunes, and flying machings called Ornithopters that could whisk away those harvesters when, well, when the worms attack. We'll get to that in a moment. You'll also have to decide who mines where, because the resources are finite and because mining in rich areas will provide more Spice for you more quickly.
SIM-SPICE-TYCOON
As stated, spice is extremely important. Not only because of its many properties (including the expansion of the mind, the pivotal point of the entire story), but because the emperor has sent you to Dune to get that Spice, and will demand constant shipments of it. Fail to meet those requests for spice, and you could quickly find yourself dead at the hand of the Emperor's shock troops. You could at most send a smaller package and hope to buy some time, or if mining has been good you could send a little something extra, and maybe keep the Emperor off your back for a few extra days. Still, you'll have to keep exploring Dune for more spice-rich territories and Fremen communities, to keep production on a constant rise.
Exploration is therefore important, and you do most of it with your trusty ornithopter - a plane that flies by beating its wings like an insect. It will get you anywhere you need to go, but unless you scout around you won't have places to go at all. You'll often get tips when talking to various characters, letting you know the general direction of new fremen settlements or other places of interest. You'll want to take someone with you, to help you spot places of importance as you fly past them. Flight itself is very simple - just choose a direction and fly. If you've got a specific destination selected, you can skip the flight sequence, saving a whole lot of time and preventing any frustration from impatient players. Whatever exploration you must do, it'll probably not prevent you from fluid gameplay, or bore you, and that's a good lesson that many other games from many different genres failed to learn.
THE SAND THICKENS WITH BLOOD
The plot will quickly thicken, and there will be a good number of conversations with NPCs to explain all the twists and turns to you. The plot is considerably simplified compared to the novel, so you don't need to be exceptionally bright to understand what's going on. New characters will often explain themselves quickly and to the point. The plot twists and turns, especially when matters begin to turn sour with those Harkonnens that are still lurking on the planet in their ominous citadel far to the north. As matters get more complex, the need will soon be clear to begin raising an army of Fremen to combat the harkonnen, pushing the game into its second phase. You'll now need to split your attention between proper spice mining (to please the emperor), and military training (to defend your miners and take new territories from your enemies). But even as the strategic aspect of the game becomes more complex, the plot continues to serve as the line along which the game proceeds - the strategy element only backs up the story, rather than fading it out. There's a very good balance here between interaction with characters and the need to fulfill strategic goals. A very good one indeed.
THE SIGN SAYS "NOT WELCOME"
Of course, aside from the greedy Emperor and the ruthless Harkonnen, the planet itself is definitely on your list of enemies. Dune is an extremely harsh place - not only is it a vast desert where water is scarce and life is short, but there's also the matter of the sandworms. These are huge creatures measuring several hundred meters, which "swim" underneath the sand and attack anything that causes a disturbance on the surface. Most importantly, the worms go after anyone mining spice, which is why you would need to equip at least some of your mining troops with Ornithopters, to allow them to escape should a worm appear. Since there's only a handful of Ornithopters just "laying around", you would eventually need to buy a few at the remote smuggler villages hidden around the planet. This costs spice though, so you have to balance your purchases with the Emperor's ever increasing shipment quotas. Fortunately, you don't have to have a degree in economics to do this - it's a pretty simple affair, and unless you splurge like crazy and leave your spice crews working in depleted regions for weeks, you shouldn't have a tough time meeting both ends. Mining crews will also get better and better as time goes on, and if you keep frequent contact with the fremen groups, talking to them about their progress and insights, their motivation will rise and they will become much more effective than before. But again, the strategic part is simply something you do as the story unfolds, it rarely takes any serious effort that might disrupt your enjoyement of the game, and for the most part the strategy creates the dynamic environment that the storyline doesn't provide.
Ultimately, Paul will need to unlock the secrets of the Spice, and empower himself in the process, with the final goal being the complete removal of the Harkonnen from the face of Dune. Thought the plot does diverge in several places from that of the novel, the general theme of the mysterious origins and effects of the Spice Melange is kept, and the quest part of the game is quite engaging, even for those who have not read the novel at all. There is a certain mystic atmosphere that makes the Dune universe what it is, and this game certainly retains that spirit. Most importantly, the game's music and graphics lend a very strong hand to this.
VISUAL SYMPHONIES
There's a good reason I mentioned the game's soundtrack at the very beginning of this review, and I wasn't kidding about it being sold as a separate work of art. Dune's soundtrack, while played on the now-ancient sound systems available at the time, was groundbreaking in many respects, and remains enjoyable even today despite its obvious "computery" feel. Most of the tracks are about as immersive as the story they accompany, and capture the very essense of the locales you will visit and the people you will meet, with great success. Tracks such as "Morning" that play as you venture out into the desert for a quick glimpse of the sunrise, or "Water" with its particularily tinkling feel, not to mention the amazing, astral intro music sequence, will all help greatly to put you right into Paul Atreides' boots. Each and every one of those pieces feels like it comes right out of Dune itself, and there's no real way to explain how well they fit in with the rest of the game to anyone who hasn't played it yet.
And the music isn't alone there either, because Cryo developed a visual theme that could almost be regarded as synonimous with the Dune universe. While it relies greatly on David Lynch's visual designs for the big screen movie, it manages to nail straight on the head some of the details that the movie missed completely. Everything from those sleek dragonfly-shaped ornithopters, to the sharp facial features of the Duke and his advisors, to the Fremen sietches built into the carcasses of dead sandworms. These may sound like minute details, but they push the level of immersion higher than most other games that have been made ever since. It looks and feels like Dune, through and through, helping the story along like no amount of text could ever do. Later games, and even the TV miniseries that followed, have all borrowed a great deal of that original visual theme, simply because it was so spot-on.
Also, if you can get your hands on the CD-ROM version of this game, it would be greatly recommended. The voice-acting is not superior per se, but it is subtle and subdued, which gives the exact atmosphere you should get from the NPCs, and you won't have to be annoyed by bad acting at any point.
Classics like this still continue to receive good praise from those who've had the chance to play them, so its age is certainly not a good reason to overlook this gem. Since no games have been made that could challenge this one on its own terms, I would say that any adventure player, and anyone who likes the Dune universe, should give this game a go. At the very least, you'll get to play a kind of game that is simply not being made anymore, and one of the best examples of immersion, setting, and seamless genre hybridization ever made. It's a lesson that perhaps more people should've learned a long time ago.
And, you'll be looking for the soundtrack in no time. ;)