Dune: Spice Wars gameplay looks suitably snug to its genre roots

This is My Dune

Publisher Funcom and developer Shiro Games have offered up the first gameplay video for their incoming strategy title Dune: Spice Wars, an adaptation of the legendary sci-fi universe devised by author Frank Herbert. The game is currently in development for PC and consoles.

As we reported in December, when Dune: Spice Wars was first announced, the new title will return the real-time-strategy roots of Westwood’s classic Amiga and PC releases of the early 1990s. Players will be afforded the opportunity to select from a number of houses set within the Dune universe, before attempting to build a thriving mining community within the planet’s lucrative spice-mine market.

The new trailer, which appears to be narrated by the dulcet tone of a Lady Jessica-type, demonstrates how players will be responsible for the building and maintaining of communities, factories, silos, and machinery, carving out a piece of the all-important spice pie while steadying the scales of democracy, subterfuge, and war with rival houses, local communities, and cut-throat bandits.

Bargaining, espionage, resourcefulness, peacekeeping, and brute force will be the tools necessary to ensure that your time on Arrakis is a successful one, lest you and your people find yourselves face down in the sand. These are very early days, but if Shiro Games is able to capture even half the atmosphere and compelling gameplay of the Westwood titles, then Dune: Spice World could prove to be a real gem.

House Ferguson all the way.