Review: From Dust
I certainly give credit to Ubisoft Montpellier for making the risky From Dust. A major publisher releasing a God game doesn’t happen very often, and it’s not the typical game you’d expect to see on Xbox Live Arcade. At its core, it definitely is an interesting concept, and it also features some impressive graphical simulations. Unfortunately, the concept and cool graphics can only carry it so far; the game starts out slow, then becomes boring, and ultimately, feels very repetitive. So while there absolutely is some merit to From Dust, the concept seems wasted, leaving you with a game that’s difficult to recommend.
The core gameplay in From Dust revolves around you reshaping the land so that NPC villagers may build and maintain a set number of villages per level. Once you build the necessary villages for the level, you can progress onto the next one. The controls are pretty simple; you move your 3D cursor around with the analog stick, and you use one trigger to suck in matter, and another to release it. There are three main types of matter you can move: earth, water, and lava.
The controls in From Dust feel imprecise at times, which is frustrating for a God game.
Moving around earth allows you to do things like build land bridges between two islands. Furthermore, the earth you lay down is fertile, and can grow palm trees and other types of vegetation. Moving water mainly is used to prevent areas from flooding and putting out fires. Lava is the most fun to play with because when you first pick it up it’s molten, and when you release, it quickly solidifies into an igneous rock. The lava will also set vegetation on fire, if you’re feeling particularly evil.
Even though it initially seems cool to play around with the matter, you quickly notice some annoyances. First of all, the controls just aren’t precise enough for the genre. It’s sometimes hard to tell where exactly you’re pointing your cursor, and as a result you end up wasting matter by putting it down in the wrong spot. Your two choices are a zoomed out camera which gives you a great deal of context without accuracy, or a zoomed in view that gives you too little context while not really being substantially better in the accuracy department. On more than one occasion, I definitely wished I was using a mouse for added accuracy.
Sometimes the villagers have a hard time going where you tell them to.
The second problem is that in spite of having several AI programmers on the team, the villagers’ path finding can be somewhat flaky. Sometimes you’ll tell them to go to a particular area and they make it there, but for some reason they refuse to continue with the command. In these instances, you have to cancel and give the command a second time. This can be frustrating in the instances when you’re on a strict timetable. The more annoying issue is when the path overlay disappears. Normally, when you issue a movement command you’ll see a path which displays exactly what route the villager is attempting and where it’s precisely blocked. But for no apparent reason, it will just disappear on occasion and never return, which can make pinpointing exactly what’s blocking them a bit difficult.
But perhaps the biggest downside is simply how repetitive the use of these core mechanics becomes. The vast majority of the story mode levels devolve into having you redirect a river, whether it be of water or lava. In order to get the liquid to flow the way you want it to go, you can expect to spend a good 5-10 minutes each time. It’s not challenging; it’s simply just time consuming. So while it is pretty cool to redirect a volcano the first time you do it, the subsequent instances really don’t provide enough variety to keep it interesting.
Playing with the lava in From Dust is pretty fun.
Now to be fair, there are some additional secondary mechanics in play. One of the cooler mechanics is sending a villager to learn a musical ward spell. Once they learn the spell, they bring it back to the village and your villagers can use the ward to defend themselves from either water or lava, depending on the type. In several of the levels, there will be periodic tsunamis which sweep across the map, and if you don’t have the ward ready in time, you can say goodbye to your villages. Once again, this is something that also is visually impressive; the first time you see a towering tsunami curl around your village you’ll be in awe of the effect. It’s also neat that unlike most other God games, the natural disasters in From Dust can be averted. But again, there just isn’t much variety or challenge here.
The other major secondary mechanic is global abilities you can use on a cool down. Many villages, when populated, teach you one of these global spells. There’s perhaps 5-6 abilities, and they range from not terribly useful (temporarily increase the amount of matter you can hold) to somewhat mandatory for the level (temporarily turn all water on the map into unmoving jelly). To round out your God-like powers, you can uproot and move a few different types of trees: one sets things on fire, another explodes when in contact with heat, and the third one releases water when in contact with heat. But outside of one or two levels, these essentially feel like a non-factor.
If a tsunami comes, this village is toast.
With the exception of the last couple of levels, for the most part it feels like you’re just going through a checklist of things that need to be done to achieve victory. When you first enter a level, your villagers are going to be near a totem where they should found a village. You then determine what is the main natural disaster you should be concerned about, and send someone after that village ward. Finally, you must redirect some rivers so your villagers can move on and found the next village. It provides little challenge and you should be able to beat most of the levels on your first try. However, I did like how the second-to-last level did require you to plan ahead a bit and figure out which order you needed to build the villages in.
In addition to the single player campaign, there’s a challenge mode which did pleasantly surprise me. These challenge levels are typically no more than a couple of minutes long, and require you to quickly solve a problem in a non-standard way. For example, one level limits you to only the ability to move earth, and you have to use it to increase water levels in order to put out fires. Still others require you to acquire a village ward in a short amount of time or face instant failure. I definitely liked these more than the story mode levels, but the unfortunate thing is that unlocking them all requires playing through all the story levels.
Ultimately, From Dust falls into the same trap Black & White did: it’s a neat concept, but has a drab execution. Whatever fun I had quickly wore off, and I was left with the repetition of redirecting rivers. If you really enjoy God games you probably will enjoy From Dust on some level. But with its high level of repetitiveness, it’s difficult to recommend to an average gamer.
VERDICT: SICK CANARY
From Dust is available now on Xbox Live Arcade. Its PC release date is TBA. Reviews appear every Friday on Game Canary. The Game Canary review system is detailed here.
Next week, I’ll probably review Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.
Categories: Reviews
Tags: From Dust, PC, Sick Canaries, Xbox 360