Dune 2000 starts with a CGI cutscene which gives a brief description of the premise of the game. The premise is actually very far removed from the saga that Frank Herbert has created.
To be fair though, Frank Herbert's saga was canonically set far, far ahead of the premise of this game, and its predecessor, Dune II. As Dune 2000 takes place at a time in the Dune universe when the quite megalomaniacal and fickle House Corrino ruled a galaxy-spanning empire, the game's premise is about yet another game of power sanctioned by the Emperor and his House for their amusement.
This game of power is of course set on the most important planet in said galaxy, Dune, also known as Arrakis. This game is simple: the Houses who serve the Emperor and fulfill his whims have to compete with each other to gather the most spice from Dune in an unspecified amount of time by whatever means possible. The price is of course Arrakis. Needless to say, with said Houses already long at each other's throats, they took the challenge.
The story is, of course, only an excuse to create three campaigns, one for each House, which are centred on crushing the other two. There appears to be some intrigue concerning the player character/protagonist, but this segment is done in such a ham-fisted manner, with details so obscured and with little else later in the story that progresses this element, it is very much forgettable.
Dune 2000, at first glance, appears to be an entry to the Dune RTS franchise that had been updated with the lessons learnt by Westwood Studios in Red Alert and Command & Conquer.
This is apparent when the player starts the tutorial for the game; the controls more than resemble those of the aforementioned lines of Westwood products. However, elements of what made the Dune series unique were retained, namely those that had to do with the background and themes of Dune canon.
One of these elements is the paving of stable formations of rock with concrete slabs, as a foundation for erecting new buildings. Canonically, this was to prevent the highly aggressive environments of Arrakis from eroding buildings.
In-game, this canonical lore is represented by a hit-point penalty on any building that had been placed on unsecured terrain. The building can be repaired, but will be subjected to slow but steady erosion damage anyway until its health reverts to its initial level. This game design would have allowed for some tactical considerations, e.g. choosing to build a building first without laying a concrete foundation in order to gain access to the benefits of the building earlier, but the concrete laying process only takes a short while and a small amount of funds, and the erosion effect can be a huge drain on resources if the player has to keep the building as strong as possible.
Moreover, land that had been secured with concrete can be claimed by any player, including those other than the player who secured the land in the first place. Again, there could be a potential for scorched-earth strategies here, e.g. abandoning a base and destroying any concrete slab to delay opponents' onslaughts and forward expansions, but destroying concrete slabs until their sprites have been removed from the land that they were on takes too long to perform.
In other words, the concrete-laying process is actually quite an unnecessary hassle, even if it adheres to Dune canon. The game designers could have been better off simply having the concrete slabs being packaged together with a building that had been constructed.
If an observant player realized the above, he/she would already have a good idea of the soundness of the game designs in Dune 2000.
Perhaps the best reason that a player should play the campaigns is that completing important missions will yield FMV/CGI cutscenes that are acted out by (presumably) famous actors and actresses, such as John-Rhys Davies (which is certainly famous). Unfortunately, they have been handed rather poor scripts, with few of them able to present these scripts in a manner that befits the personality of the characters that they are acting out as.
As for the missions in the campaign themselves, they comprise of all-too-familiar archetypes of RTS missions, e.g. search-and-destroy and timed defence. A player that was already jaded from the many unimpressive titles that permeated the RTS genre during the turn-over to the new millennium would tire of the campaigns quickly.
However, if the player can tolerate the rather bland campaign and cutscenes of dubious calibre, the player will find that the game pays some homage to the gameplay designs of the original Dune II game (and this is perhaps the best selling point of Dune 2000) – for better or worse.
As mentioned earlier, some of the gameplay designs have been adapted from those in the Command & Conquer and Red Alert lines of games. The player has to construct bases by starting out with a Construction Yard, which unlocks the building menu, and then build buildings that unlock the unit menu, as well as buildings that will be responsible for sustaining base economy for its growth and the eventual raising of an army to crush the opposition with.
The caveat here is that bases can only be built on solid ground, not sand, in contrast to the other two Westwood lines of games where a player can build on any ground as long as there is an MCV that had deployed there. Of course, this has been a hallmark of the Dune RTS games, but this design limits the ability of a player to strategically plonk down buildings wherever it is convenient. In other words, it is easier to predict where bases are, especially in multiplayer.
This would appear to have crimped the design of any superweapons for this game, of which there are scant few; only House Harkonnen appears to field such an archetype of a weapon, and even so it is a very low yield one so as not to wipe out enemy bases too quickly and thus imbalance the game. Nonetheless, as a consequence, the highest tier technology available to each House appears to be just another unlocked unit (which also is not powerful enough to annihilate bases on their own), or it is an unimpressive bombardment weapon.
Furthermore, the stable ground formations in most maps can sometimes be just too small, and require a lot of frugal use of space. Considering that units cannot move through tightly packed buildings, the player will have to build bases in rather predictable manners: non-unit-producing buildings at the rear, the buildings which do at the front, near the entrance slopes to said solid ground located above the sand.
Some of the buildings in this game merely have the function of unlocking units; there are three of them in fact, and most of them are weak, large and expensive buildings which are too vulnerable to raids. In other words, they are liabilities. This was an antiquated game design that Westwood has yet to eschew.
Fortunately, other buildings are not as useless. The rest are unit-producing buildings, defensive structures and economic structures, all of which would be familiar to veterans of Dune II. Yet, other than aesthetic designs, all three Houses have practically the same structures, and thus almost the same building strategies.
The game designers have also included peculiar requirement that some buildings have to be upgraded first before some units can be unlocked; upgrades have to be performed by spending credits in an "Upgrade" tab of sorts. Perhaps the "Upgrade" tab has been introduced to slow down the unlocking of players' tech trees, but players would find it difficult to perceive such a feature as an overall hassle.
An RTS fan will not be getting much in the way of variety of strategies in this game, at least with respect to base-building.
If there is one silver lining to the designs of base-building in Dune 2000, it is that Westwood has wisely retained the spice-harvesting feature, which is one of the most famous hallmarks of the Dune franchise. Harvesters have to risk going out onto the sands to harvest the melange spice, thus exposing themselves to sandworms (which remain as invulnerable as ever) and raids. Spice fields can be situated quite some distance away from solid ground, so solid ground closest to them is the most strategically valuable spot, at least until players unlock Carryalls, which accelerate spice-harvesting.
Each House has some units common to them, such as all types of infantry, with a few exceptions here and there to balance the game. For example, Houses Harkonnen and Atreides have the Trikes, which are fast ATVs with anti-infantry attacks.
A few vehicles are introduced to the Dune franchise. The Quads fulfil the role of a vehicle that can strike fast against armour. Siege Tanks perform exactly as their name suggests, while Missile Tanks are intended to be used against tight clusters of base defences.
(Oddly though, House Ordos lacks access to Missile Tanks, which can severely hamper its ability to smash through players who 'turtle' up. This game design may have been intended to compensate for House Ordos' ability to field Saboteurs, who can cloak and ruin buildings instantly. However, they are costly to field and are just not cost-efficient solutions to swaths of base defences.)
The Combat Tank is where the Houses start to diverge in unit design. House Harkonnen typically prefers a brutish and slow variant, House Ordos prefers a fast one for hit-and-run attacks, and House Atreides typically prefers a balanced tank.
Overall, one can say that the units which are commonly available to all three Houses are quite utilitarian in design, if quite unimpressive. However, these are the units that players can obtain quite quickly, either through churning them out using factories or purchasing them from the Starport. The latter method is perhaps the best contribution to the game designs of RTS games (though it is not an original one), as the Starport can help field armies quickly – if players' economies can support the asking prices, which fluctuate according to supply/demand ratios.
There is perhaps a bit more fun to be had from the units which are unique to certain Houses. For example, House Harkonnen has the least number of special units, but they have the Devastator super-heavy assault tanks, which can also self-destruct to turn a bungled assault into at least one that will inflict a lot of damage on the enemy.
House Atreides is the only House with aerial combat assets, though they work a lot like GDI airstrikes in the Command & Conquer games, i.e. they are bombing runs that can only performed once every few minutes. House Atreides also has access to Sonic Tanks (which is the only unit in the game that can damage everything in its line of fire) and the Fremen, which are cloaked infantry, practically.
House Ordos perhaps has the most interesting units. In place of the Trike, House Ordos can build the Raider, which is superior in a scouting role. The Deviator returns from Dune 2, and retains its ability to convert enemy vehicles over to House Ordos, though its rate of fire is terribly slow now. Then, there is the aforementioned Saboteur.
In fulfilling demands for gameplay balance in multiplayer, Westwood has patched in a handful of units to fill in tactical gaps in unit variety for each House.
Despite these special units providing the most strategic value that the player can have from any House, an experienced RTS player would find them quite underwhelming, especially considering the much more impressive units in Westwood's other lines of RTS games.
If Dune 2000 was intended to be a successor of sorts to Dune II, its graphical designs would of course be leagues ahead of the latter. However, if Dune 2000's graphics are to be assessed according to pars that had been set in the RTS genre at the time, they are just barely decent. A lot of models in this game are static, animations are sparse (even for units) and the camera has been set far above so as to give a convenient reason/excuse for small and simply-done sprites for units.
The desert setting of Arrakis also conveniently lets the game designers create just two main kinds of textures: sand and rock. It would have been acceptable, if the map and terrain designers had not repeated the same patterns of textures many times within any given map. For example, players would be seeing a particular pattern of gashes that resemble whorls on many patches of solid ground within the same map.
The audio designs are even more disappointing than the graphics. Many sound effects are meek, with the exception of so few that at least pay respect to whichever portion of Dune canon that they are associated with. Ambient sound effects are also quite bare – if present at all.
There are also only a handful of soundtracks, few of which – if any – has an entertainment value that can match that of those soundtracks in Westwood's other games.
Dune II did not have a multiplayer component, so Dune 2000 introduced it to the franchise. This feature appears to be a lot like those in the first Command & Conquer, e.g. pretty much the same game modes, albeit with the premise of Dune. Otherwise, there is nothing especially spectacular about the multiplayer.
In conclusion, Dune 2000 comes across as being targeted solely at those who cherished Dune II. If the goal of this product had been a promise of a remake of Dune II and only that game alone, Dune 2000 would have performed splendidly. Yet, if this is the case, this would be a much insulated goal indeed. Dune 2000 is just a decent RTS game, with little to contribute to the genre.