its dune 2 in '3D'
Dune. Emperor: Battle for Dune. i'm obviously very excited, i read reviews that say its pretty good. so, i get it!
Here's what I thought of it. First off, I love the cheesy, melodramatic acting in the cutscenes. its great, and it fits perfectly. I love the archetypical house leaders. the oh so noble its sickening duke achillus (anything at all like achilles?), the maniacally hilarious EVIL baron (sound russian anyone?), and the faceless spineless speaker of the ordos. haha! great, i can't wait to begin!
so then we get to the missions, and its looking pretty good. graphically, its superb. they've taken all the best bits of dune and polished them up very nicely. units look great. although, i was a little disappointed by the design of the devastator, harkonnen's most noteworthy unit. why does it have 3 legs and such a ridiculous walk? it really detracts from its awesome might. surely a standard mech would've looked much tougher. anyways ok, fine. apart from that i'm happy.
so, i continue playing, at the second mission i cut the music. the sound is generally horrible. the range of unit responses is cack. they each have maybe three different ones. "affirmative", "moving out", " ready". the 'helpful' voice is irritating. she's awfully slow to respond to whats appening, making her generally a pointless accessory. 'spice harvester under attack' so i scroll back and its already gone! splah. my initial excitement is waning.
as i continue to play on i notice more and more problems. the AI for example is dire. the units are some of the stupidest ever. they get in each others way, they take the most convoluted routes to places. they are unable to move and fire at the same time, meaning you have to baby step them about in order for them to survive any sort of attack or relocation. horrible. this is war? dumbarse units plodding about. i forgave dune 2 for this because it was 1993, but i'm afraid there is no longer that excuse available.
this is where the whole game falls down. they havent added any new material and have only very superficially improved the existing ones. the 'sub-factions' are essentially useless. why would i care if the ix need my help, when all they give me are the lame duplicator tank and the silly bomb spider? they can rot! also, didn't it bother you that you have to build every single other structure to get the top level units, and they turn out useless anyway. every single structure needs to be upgraded every time. surely once we've got the technology to build a unit once, we'd have it as common knowledge, and cease to build and inferior factory? now the game is both annoying me and greatly disappointing me.
now for my major gripe. i was waiting for the sonic tank, my weapon of choice in dune 2 and it comes along and they stink! they're useless. firstly, because their weapon goes through anything, everything is harmed. this was also the case in dune 2, so it meant that you had to keep them away from your base. their flaw was remedied in dune 2 in that sonic tanks couldnt harm each other, making a sonic tank gang, a lethal combination. now, they die within two shots of their gun cos theyre too stupid to get out of eachothers way. and the lack of any kind of formation feature renders them utterly useless and if anything, a burden. this doesnt make any sense why a unit would have such a big flaw. it means i've got the most useful and powerful unit (the minotaur) in level 3. why bother continuing? you've peaked already. the only other useful unit is the mongoose because it can fire at airborn units. so all i end up doing, out of necessity, is building hoards of minotaurs and mongooses. how dull.
gameplay - dross. it plays so much like dune 2, its ridiculous! come on! the only added feature really is the multiple select. theres no formations. and new units are derivative, they have lame gimmicky features that have no
value within the game. this means your armies consist of 2 different units at best. in this way, its changed nothing from dune 2, and if anything, has actually de-volved. westwood, come on! you created such brilliant rts' as
command and conquer, red alert, tiberian sun. what happened here? tactics are redundant because you have to move your armies at such lame distances at a time or they'll get blown to pieces by a couple of infantry stood nearby. you just want to get the mission over with to see which new units you get and its some **** 'zombie' man that dies from the mere thought of voilence. what happened here? how did this steaming pile get boxed up and released?
i'll stick to the original, its not great, but its better than this!