Type of medium: Game - PC
Posting date: 26-01-2006
Author: Zhen-Chan

Review: Frank Herbert's Dune
10.191. The Atreides and the harkonnen are fighting over the planet Arrakis, also known as Dune. Dune's a planet, that contains a valuable substance, called spice, enabling long distance space travels and the such. being the only planet in the entire universe, it's fairly understandable everybody wants a piece of it. The 2 houses have been fighting for a long time, until House Harkonnen Invaded the Atreides palace, killing everyone, except for Jessica, the wife of the Duke of Atreides, and their son, Paul. Swearing he'll get his revenge against the Harkonnen, It is up to Paul to gather the fremen, native sand people, and rally them to unite and fight against their common enemy.

I like dune. I've played Dune 1, 2 and 2000, and that's about it. I really liked those games. Then, i get this game "frank herbert's dune".... Ok, let's check this out. Remember, this is a game from 2001, so it's a bit aged. I won't be going into the graphics. After fiddling around a bit, I was able to get the game started. Apperantly, the game's inspired on the tv miniseries with the same name.

First thing I've noticed is that the subtitles are really quirky at times. At times, it doesn't match the spoken words, and it changes way too fast. The dialouge itself is kind of....well.... delayed. It takes 2-3 second pauses between speakers, which make interrupting lines like this "thirdly, you need to escape out of the harvester befo-" *3 second pause* "let me guess.....". Stuff like this happens a lot, and you can imagine what you COULD have said, between the pauses. like, "thirdly, you need to escape out of the harvester befo-" *Inner thoughts*"before the harkonnen get there, and fuck my pretty blue eyes out of my skull?"*inner thoughts* "let me guess......". It doesn't really help that the speakers are as emotionless as hell.

Well, as for the gameplay, it's a...um.... I'm not sure WHAT it is. It's a 3rd person adventure game, where you walk around as Paul Atreides, stabbing Harkonnen troops, and solve a few puzzles while doing it. The camera's really bad, and you'll be able to control the camera yourself, but it's chaos everywhere. While you're stabbing a Soldier, it shows the same animation every time, and WHILE in that animation, you're completely exposed to the other troops, who gleefully start shooting you. Also, what's the use of the "looking around the corner" function, if you have your mouse-look, which can pretty much do that, without exposing yourself.
 
Grade: 40 out of 100

The game's fairly simple but ok, but too many little things killed the fun. The gameplay isn't top-notch either, so I'm sad to say that this is a sucky Dune game. I hope that show was cancelled.

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