Dune 2000
Westwood Studios

Of Course it was, what did you expect?:

Ok biggest difference between this game and the other Westwood efforts is that this is their first game to use 16-bit graphics, meaning lots of colours. Now obviously it looks better than the original Dune 2, or C&C and easily nicer than Red Alert (which looked like a Cartoon). Ok let’s see now, there are lots of colours, nice explosions, colourful missile trails and well you get the drift, it actually has alot in common with KKND 2.

Thankfully Westwood are always attentive to their animations and it shows, while most companies satisfy themselves with just drawing eight angles for their units, Westwood do at least twice that, therefor vehicles actually look like they are turning instead of instant direction changes. Now while the graphics are nice, there are some things that annoy me with them. First it’s not obvious if your being shot or not, Graphically speaking, all you really see is a ball of light or the 100% full burn looking missile (no smoke trail, just a long flame) and then they just disappear. Same goes for the building explosion, it’s a little too quaint, not quite as good as KKND 2’s great big OTT explosions although still nice enough.

Otherwise there isn’t that much wrong graphically, My only worry is that a certain group of people are going to complain that it’s not 3D and that it doesn’t work on their Voodoo 2 card. Now if you want a 3D RTS game, wait for Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, or Force Commander or if you are really patient, Dark Reign 2.

to the next page...