I’ve never played Dune 2000 back in the day, maybe because I wasn’t a fan of Dune 2 in the first place. Although I love both Command&Conquer and Red Alert dearly, and I did complete Dune 2 once. But I decided to give Dune 2000 a try. the original version doesn’t work that well on Windows 10. The cutscenes aren’t playing, the speed is either too fast or too slow. So I went with the Gruntmods version. It supports resolutions up to 4K, although the maps in this game are so tiny they would fit in 4K twice.
The engine is from Command&Conquer, with a couple of transparency effects, like the electricity indicating a worm. There are no rally points, and no queuing. Which is especially annoying, since in this game buildings need to be placed on concrete. Concrete comes in blocks of 2×2. But for the basic resource gathering refinery you need 3×2, so you end up placing 4 concrete blocks before placing a factory.
One element I don’t remember in either earlier Westwood games or later ones, such as Red Alert 2, is the need to upgrade buildings. Basic barracks produces just the machine gunners, and for rocket troopers you need to upgrade it.
The only nice detail I found about this game is that despite all three factions having light tanks, they have different stats, with Atreides being the baseline, Harconen being stronger but slower and Ordos being faster but weaker.
The game also has live-action briefings before missions. Curiously Harkonen’s mentat here is called Hayt and he’s a gola, just like in Dune Messiah. Why not use Piter from the original Dune book?
I mean, he actually acts like Piter, the deranged drug addict, and not like Hayt the boring phylosopher anyway.
The main problem is that campaign isn’t much fun. AI gets those random drops of reinforcements that you can’t predict, and in general quite overpowered even on “Normal”. On the other hand, the pathfinding is terrible, so you can confuse your opponent by building cheap walls.
