Dune: Spice Wars review: a compulsive 4X that both nails and wastes its source material

There’s something that feels oddly momentous about sending one of Dune: Spice Wars’ harvesters to get to work worm-dodging while hoovering up MSG (magical space glitter). It was, after all, Dune II’s implementation of these trucks that are largely responsible for the shape of the entire RTS genre. I’ve mused before that if you count Alien as something that wouldn’t exist without Dune, along with the effects the RTS had on esports, it's wild to consider how different gaming could have been if Frank Herbert hadn’t visited Florence in 1957 to chronicle a natural phenomenon. It’s one heck of a butterfly effect, which is fitting, because Spice Wars itself can often feel like a creative exploration of how integral butterfly effects are to grand strategy rulesets. Forget those harvesters for a moment, because this dry but undeniably captivating 4X is all about the steamroll.

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