Review: From Dust
One lesson that I took from playing From Dust is that geology is an amazing subject to study. I remember taking a geology class in college and learning all about rocks and the formations of land masses and their evolution over time. Reading about them was one thing, but actually going out in the field and examining igneous rock formations and how they shaped our surroundings made the material easier to understand.
While From Dust isn’t meant to be educational, you could say that it will teach you to appreciate geology because it excels in representing the interaction of the earth’s elements. Because you are also a god-like entity controlling the earth and shaping the land, it is a lot more fun than reading a textbook.
From Dust puts you in the role of an omnipotent wisp of energy known as the Breath that is capable of absorbing and moving around elements such as water, land, and lava. Using the left shoulder button to absorb an element and the right shoulder button to release it, you will have to assist a tribe of humans in building their villages and powering up totems that will open up the way to other maps. It sounds easy, but remember that the earth is both your supplier of resources and your adversary. Each of the game’s story mode levels offers a new challenge for you to deal with such as incoming typhoons, floods, and forest fires. As the game progresses, these challenges become more complicated and trickier to complete.
Aside from the ability to pick up different elements, you can also wield unique powers that will amplify your abilities and allow you to better affect your surroundings for a limited time. For example, one of my favorite powers allows you to jellify water and essentially freeze it in its tracks. If your villagers need to cross a large pool of water, you can use this power to open a path for them to travel through to get to the other side. Your abilities depend on what map you are playing on and can only be used if a particular village is up and running. Each village has a unique power for you to use, so it is up to you to decide in which order to build each one as one village’s power can help you protect another from the onslaughts of nature.
Your tribesmen, bless their hearts, aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, it seems, and will give you trouble when leading them to different locations. From Dust only lets you direct your villagers to specific totems on the map, so you can’t actually control their specific movement. So although you may have just created a convenient route for your villagers to follow to get to their destination, they, however, will go a different way and get stuck. When the clock is ticking and an impending tidal wave is on its way, these hiccups in gameplay add another challenge to your list.
Like I mentioned earlier, From Dust’s physics engine does a great job representing the earth’s elements in motion and their effects on its surface. The earth is alive, and you will see how everything begins to change over the course of time. Water will erode the land, lava will harden and form cliffs for you to build upon, and volcanoes will succumb to the inevitable inundation of the ocean. One map I really enjoyed playing, despite taking me about an hour to finish, gave me the challenge of juggling a series of floods and lava flows. After destroying an annoying volcano by leading a lake into its mouth, I was filled with a great sense of accomplishment that I had just outwitted nature and replicated something that might have naturally occurred thousands of years ago.
The game is also quite short and may take you a few hours to complete depending on how quickly you solve each map. While you don’t have a time limit, some maps have timed catastrophic events that will cause you to hurry up. To increase its replay value, each stage also has hidden artifacts for you to find that reveal more about the history and culture of your villagers. Some stages are so chaotic, that you will want to leave once you find the gateway to the next map. But if you decide to stay and fill your environment with more land mass, your vegetation percentage for that map will increase and reward you with more village lore.
Aside from the main story maps, there is also a challenge mode that gives you various scenarios to clear under certain restrictions. Many of these scenarios are puzzle-like and require quick thinking skills, but they can also be solved rather quickly, leaving you wanting more. My only other concern aside from the game’s short lifespan is that it has a rather long initial loading time and doesn’t let you skip cutscenes even after you’ve seen them multiple times.
While it may not be as scientifically correct as a college textbook, From Dust turns geology into a great game. I had fun molding and shaping the earth, but I only wish that the game lasted a bit longer and had a better control system for your villagers. Unlike most civilization games though, From Dust doesn’t want you to care too much about the progress of your villages and people. Instead, Ubisoft spent so much time on the game’s physics because it wants you to feel the power of wielding the earth in your hands. And, boy, does it feel good.
Score given: 8.2/10
Published July 2011 | VGRevolution.com
Giancarlo Saldana is a freelance writer and Gaming News Editor for Blast Magazine.