Dune: Spice Wars takes its strategy into early access this month

Fight for spice and sand

The latest video game adaptation of the Dune universe will be playable this month. Real-time strategy game Dune: Spice Wars will launch into early access on Steam on April 26, 2022.

Developer Shiro Games and Funcom announced the news today, alongside another playable faction in the strategy game: the Fremen. If you’ve seen or read Dune, you’re familiar with the Fremen. They’re the people who call the harsh desert planet Arrakis home.

Fremen move better across open desert and are less likely to attract sandworms. They’ll also be better at allying with the neutral Sietches. Arrakis is home turf for the Fremen, after all, so they’ll make for formidable foes against the Harkonnen, Atreides, and Smuggler factions.

Shiro Games’ Dune: Spice Wars mixes elements of real-time strategy and 4X games. As the different factions vie for control of Arrakis and its much-coveted spice, players can try to establish bases, develop infrastructure, and wage war to win the planet. Or use subterfuge, politics, and diplomacy instead.

Getting a little spicy

This is only one of Funcom’s Dune games in the pipeline, as the publisher also has an open-world survival game set in Frank Herbert’s Dune universe in development too.

Dune has had a lengthy history in video games, as we combed back over in our retrospective last year. While its adventure game was also notable, Dune: Battle for Arrakis wound up being a landmark game for Westwood Studios. It’s easy to say that Dune and the real-time strategy are pretty intertwined.

With the first movie getting a solid reception and more on the way, the door’s open for Dune to get a video game resurgence too. Beyond getting some skins in Fortnite, that is.

The battle for Arrakis will kick off again later this month, when Dune: Spice Wars launches into early access on PC via Steam on April 26, 2022.