Fortunately, air defenses can be restored with a downloadable patch. Somewhat surprisingly, there isn't much variation in mission types. It's still the simple game of form a base, harvest, build, and destroy, with the occasional small squad action thrown in for good measure. The patented action is still there and finely honed, thus fanatics of such games will feel right at home. These age-old conventions are double edged; gamers have supported the genre and are familiar with the controls and gameplay, but lack of innovation could create a backlash from buyers wanting more.
The full-motion video cut-scenes are also showing their age. The writing and acting has also gone downhill; characters huff and bluster their way through ill-conceived lines with laughable zeal. Apparently, the idea is quantity over quality, as there are many minutes of the cheesy acting to wade through to get back to the fight. Sound effects and music still remain topnotch, faithfully carrying out the early precedent of excellence.
As usual, the worm effects are perfect, and the meaty destruction of your units left too long in the sandbox is unmistakable. Overall, this isn't a bad game by any means, and the action is as addictive as always. Theoretically each person on that map could have a different sub-house ally, with nobody knowing who that ally is until the first attack. Ultimately it add mystery to the skirmish and thus makes the tactics and the game's outcome far less predictable than usual.
Despite its many shortcomings in other areas, there's no denying the multiplayer side of Emperror is a technical step forward from anything they've done before, and there's no question that it advances the gamepiay significantly.
If you want a long-lasting multiplayer game with great options and a plethora of units and tactics, you could do a lot worse. In fact, we recommend it - providing you can forgive the graphical dog's dinner, of course Earlier we mentioned how other real-time strategy games had nothing to worry about when it came to the graphics engine in Emperor.
Unfortunately, pretty much the same can be said for the gameplay. On the one hand, it's too simplistic to attract fans of games like Earth and The Moon Project. Conversely, the tiresome harvesting and refining concept is too fiddly and old-skool for those who've defected over to the more straightforward approach of Ground Control anti Steel Soldiers. There truly is only one type of games player who will appreciate the limited appeal of Emperor and that is the devout Westwood groupie.
For them Emperor contains all the right ingredients: the instantly recognisable resource management interface, the cheesy FMV acting, the ability to play as one of three sides, and the 3D engine fans have been screaming for.
Oh yes, if you've survived on the Westwood diet for the last few years, you'll quickly forgive the prototype engine and appreciate Emperor lor what it really is - more new levels for Tiberian Sun and a few more units to boot. For the rest of us though, it's simply impossible to get overly excited about. We had high hopes for the game, as everyone did, but we can't help feeling a little let down. We know there will be heated disagreement from many quarters, but if those responsible for Emperor are honest with themselves, they must know in their hearts that there is much, much better to come.
This installment follows the struggle of the three "Great Houses" of Atreides, Harkonnen and Ordos to control the planet Arrakis, also known as Dune. The storyline borrows from both the literary and feature film versions of the Dune story for the world setting and general feel of the plot. The story begins following the assassination of the reigning Emperor. Prior to his death, the Emperor had set in motion a great war for control of the governorship of Arrakis, in the hope that the great Houses would destroy each other and thus eliminate all competition for his position.
The three Houses now compete for the Emperor's vacant position. The prize will go to the House capable of controlling the most territory and thus the spice Melange, which exists only on Arrakis; the spice is the secret to extended life, space travel and other such things.
Gameplay is pretty typical RTS fare. The majority of gameplay revolves around building a base, defending the base, collecting resources, building troops, finding and killing the enemy.
A few of the missions include objectives such as rescuing a lost commander, but most are typical "destroy the enemy and take over his territory" type missions. In the single-player mode, you may choose either a single skirmish battle in a variety of game locations, or campaign mode in easy, medium or hard difficulty settings. You may play as any of the three Houses, and the storylines and units vary somewhat depending on the chosen House. One place where Battle for Dune does differ from many RTS games is that it offers some degree of non-linearity in the campaign mode.
You are presented with a simple Risk -like map that represents the territory controlled by the various factions. You may choose one of several different territories, which represent various phases of the campaign, to pursue.
Unfortunately, there are usually only two or three choices at a time, so the game is still fairly linear. Another interesting gameplay feature is that you may choose to form alliances with various sub-Houses, such as the Fremen warriors made famous in the Dune movie.
These alliances allow for the construction of special units unique to the sub-House with which your House has allied.
Attacks from the invincible Sand Worms and sandstorms that can damage your units and buildings provide additional obstacles to victory for both sides. The interface is fairly straightforward. You are presented with an on-screen button menu; click to select functions such as constructing buildings, training new infantry, repairing or selling buildings, and setting patrol routes. A radar screen is also provided for viewing the game map and maneuvering over large distances. Collecting spice is the only real resource-gathering event in this game and is more or less automated once you have constructed a refinery.
The menu buttons make base construction a snap. Controlling your troops can prove to be a more difficult and often frustrating experience. While both the mouse and keyboard shortcuts provide some means of "grouping" various units together, it is still difficult to get your troops to function well as a team.
They will often run into each other and just stop, and you must go back and manually move troops around to get them where they are going. I also found it difficult to move individual units into good attacking and defending positions quickly enough to be of any benefit in the generally fast-paced battles. Both enemy and unit AI leave something to be desired.
Units will often ignore height advantages, walk right into enemy gun turret fire, and get run over by vehicles when they could easily avoid these situations. Getting your troops to behave in a semi-intelligent manner when attacking or defending requires a large amount of tedious micro-managing. The game provides support for up to 4 players via LAN or Westwood Online's matching service for skirmish and deathmatches.
You can customize the amount of money, starting equipment and various other features or even set up your own custom match. Two players may also elect to play a co-op campaign, in which both players are given units and may work together to accomplish campaign goals. The matching service is fairly speedy and lag wasn't much of a problem when I played. The skirmishes and deathmatches were more interesting than playing a skirmish against computer AI, but I found myself getting bored with them fairly quickly.
I enjoyed the two-player co-op mode more than the skirmish mode, though it also failed to capture my interest. Battle for Dune is set in a fully 3D environment. The buildings and units look pretty good, but the terrain is uniformly blah. Although battles take place in environments as diverse as a desert, a water world and an ice-covered planet, the only real difference in the look of the terrain is the color. The buildings and infantry units suffer from too much similarity as well.
The Harkonnen troops are usually easy to pick out because of their red color, but the colors of the Atreides and Ordos troops are very similar and it can be easy to mix up which infantry belongs to which side. The cut-scene movies benefit from very high production values and resemble the feature film Dune.
However, they do suffer from some amount of graininess and overacting. Overall, the graphics don't hinder gameplay that much, but they don't do much to enhance it either.
The audio for the game is very nice. The game includes a variety of digitized speech that ranges from updates on the status of reinforcements to mission objectives to interesting, sometimes amusing quips from the various units in your army. Westwood did a good job of giving the various units distinct personality through their lines when you select them or give them a command. The music has a nice sci-fi movie score sound to it. The sound effects from the vehicles, units, and other special effects are all fairly convincing.
Unfortunately, Emperor: Battle for Dune doesn't rank high on the originality front. The game has a very old-school RTS feel to it and while it incorporates some interesting ideas, it doesn't do much with them. The Dune-flavored units and obstacles add something different to the game world, but overall the game feels more like Command and Conquer in Dune clothing than an entirely new game.
Westwood doesn't do much that is new with the RTS formula, but they don't really do anything to screw it up either. For those looking to move beyond standard RTS gameplay, this is not the place to look. While Emperor: Battle for Dune has no glaring problems, it also has no standout features to separate it from every other RTS game out there.
I found myself getting bored with this game fairly quickly. The battles can be tedious. The cut-scenes are often silly and almost always over-acted, and as you move deeper into the game they taper off rather than building up to a big finale. The replay value is diminished by the fact that even on the hardest setting the game is more frustrating than challenging, and the Houses do not differ enough from each other to justify playing the campaign again as a different House. The bottom line: The story is ok.
The graphics are ok. The interface is ok. The game is ok. However, there is nothing about Emperor: Battle for Dune that will make the average player sit up and go "wow. Browse games Game Portals. Emperor: Battle for Dune. Install Game. Click the "Install Game" button to initiate the file download and get compact download launcher. Locate the executable file in your local folder and begin the launcher to install your desired game.
While the Atreides are noble warriors, the Harkonnens violent and cruel, and the Ordos rapacious aliens who use hideous biological technology, there is little to separate them tactically.
Basic units have counterparts that are nearly identical in the ranks of their opponents. For example, where the Atreides boast Kindjai Infantry with pistols and rocket launchers, the Harkonnen have Troopers with missile launchers, and the Ordos field AA Troopers, also with missile launchers.
This is reflected further up the ranks as well, though there are certain overall characteristics that can be taken advantage of, such as the strong Harkonnen armor and the Ordos' hit and run capabilities. About the only truly different units in the game are those used by the rather creepy Tleilaxu, a smaller house that uses flesh vats to grow Contaminators that infect opposing forces and turn them into copies of themselves, and Leeches, that fire larvae at foes.
All houses share the same buildings, with the exception of gun turrets that slightly differ the Ordos turret launches poisonous gas, the Harkonnen model shoots flame, and the Atreides version features machine guns.
Where Emperor truly stands apart from Westwood's earlier efforts is in the design of the single-player campaigns. Instead of fighting a series of must-win battles until the final showdown, here you wage war on a dynamic map.
When the game begins, Arrakis is evenly divided into sectors controlled by the three houses. From there, you decide how to proceed, which sector to attack in order to best advance the war. At the same time, you'll be forced to defend your territory against enemy invasion.
This adds a much-needed jolt to the standard RTS style, though it's not quite as freeform as you might believe. For starters, your choices are generally quite limited. There are usually just two or three sectors controlled by each opposing house that can be attacked at a time and at least two are typically off-limits due to severe storms.
These often feature fairly similar enemy forces, so it's not as if these selections represent vastly different tactical plans. Also, there are certain elements of the story that seem to be set in stone, even the alliances with lesser houses and other independent groups.
As an example of this, I was never able to form an alliance between the Atreides and the Tleilaxu, even though it was specifically noted in one of the cutscenes that the choice of ally would be left up to me. Even when you are given varied mission objectives, the route taken to victory is almost always the same. Just like Red Alert , you always start off with a small group of forces and must immediately set up a base and start collecting resources in this case, the Spice Melange and constructing buildings and military units.
Repetition is the watchword here, as you'll spend much of your time building the same structures over and over again. There are some episodes that break this trend, though they're few and far between. After leaving the campaign map, the gameplay here is very traditional and without much in the way of surprises. There are a few worthy tactical elements, though.
Ally yourself with the Fremen tribesmen and you'll be able to summon mighty Sandworms to crush the opposition. The value of high ground is emphasized more here than in perhaps any other RTS in recent memory. As bases must be established on the rock that towers over the sandy seas below, you have to take advantage of this by building in the right areas and fortifying that position with long-range units such as mortars and snipers.
Unfortunately, this emphasizes the relatively poor AI granted to your computer opponents, who will often assault such solid encampments from the sand below rather than flanking you in an attempt to launch an attack from a level playing field.
If you work quickly and fortify your structures properly, you can expect little serious challenge from the opposition while you build a massive offensive force. About the only obstacle to victory is the sub-par pathfinding.
Your units will bump into one another and stop, wander into the range of enemy gun turrets, and so on. Large-scale battles should be micro-managed for the best result, which of course gets a little annoying at times.
And infantry units are so dumb that they'll often allow themselves to be crushed by oncoming vehicles that could easily have been avoided.
It's nice that they put direct firing orders ahead of self-preservation, but still. Additional gaming options might provide players with further entertainment value, but again, there really isn't anything here that hasn't been seen before.
Skirmish mode features some interesting ideas involving alliances, Sandworm activity, prebuilt bases, and crates with goodies inside, though there isn't a map editor or a random map generator. That alone will limit the replay value. Multiplayer is handled through the dedicated Westwood Online service. One helpful frill here is that you can go online to play a campaign cooperatively. It's good to see that, despite everything else, the designers realized the value of a cooperative mode.
Good points aside, Emperor: Battle for Dune is a tired game based on a limited concept that was beaten to death in Dynamic campaign and true 3D engine or not, the essentials of gameplay still come down to the very same basics that have dominated such titles for going on a decade now. Even though Westwood has thrown in everything but the kitchen sink to make this arguably the ultimate traditional RTS, it's still hard to contemplate playing the actual game without yawning.
Screenshots from MobyGames. PAULO 0 point. Harghantz -3 points. I run on win 11 fail with popup "could not initialize directX. Praisethelard 0 point.
After install and applying 1. FGearshifter -1 point. Unpack the four ISO-Files to a folder where you store game images. Write down the CD-Key. Run the setup and install the game to a folder of your choice. Type in the CD-Key during installation. Install Patch 1. Start the game with the shortcut.
If the game doesn't run at once, open the Task Manager. Close the process of the Emperor. Minimize the Task Manager and start the game again. After playing, close the process of the RunDLL Watch the opening video sequence. The patented action is still there and finely honed, thus fanatics of such games will feel right at home.
These age-old conventions are double edged; gamers have supported the genre and are familiar with the controls and gameplay, but lack of innovation could create a backlash from buyers wanting more.
The full-motion video cut-scenes are also showing their age. The writing and acting has also gone downhill; characters huff and bluster their way through ill-conceived lines with laughable zeal. Apparently, the idea is quantity over quality, as there are many minutes of the cheesy acting to wade through to get back to the fight. Sound effects and music still remain topnotch, faithfully carrying out the early precedent of excellence. As usual, the worm effects are perfect, and the meaty destruction of your units left too long in the sandbox is unmistakable.
Overall, this isn't a bad game by any means, and the action is as addictive as always. If Emperor: Battle for Dune was a clone made by a lesser company, it would have been stellar. As it is, though, Westwood Studios has pushed the license and design one step too far.
Cleaning up the vehicle but not improving the engine that drives it won't always sell. Emperor: Battle for Dune is easily playable but just as easily forgettable.
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