Some practice given I haven't written anything in a while. Average-point is 5/10. Here goes, let me know your thoughts on how this was written please!
You watch the lava cool and form solid rock, blocking off the path it once travelled down. But now the lava stream travels in a different direction, and it creeps towards your village, where it causes a building to catch fire. The inferno rages, and as the lava covers the ground, tribesmen screaming in pitiful agony as they are consumed by this beast of nature, you can only think "wow, the fluids physics are great!"
From Dust is shiny. I had to beat away a dozen kids with ADD to get my copy out of the store, and when I first played it my room lit up like a disco ball coated in Edward Cullen's ashes. It's not jaw-droppingly detailed like Crysis or Far Cry 2, yet the weird-but-wonderful architecture, the even weirder plantlife, even down to the cute little masks on your victims villagers, screams "quirky" in your ear like a guy wearing fake glasses and sporting an ironic beard.
That's not to call From Dust shallow and materialistic, indeed the game is quite the opposite: simple, yet with underlying deepness. It's a god-game, a genre known for developers boasting that their titles allow you to shape the fates of civilisations, and for gamers' tendencies to interperet this as a contest for how much misery and unholy amounts of pain you can inflict upon your digital peons. You are "The Breath", the manifestation of magical music which controls the elements....or something. The plot is minimal, serving only as the reason why you hop between levels to do battle with nature. You have the ability to take and displace sand earth, water and lava, which you use in combination to form and raise islands, drain lakes, or vainly attempt to stop a river of lava turning your village into tribesmen flambé. Until you start getting village-activated powers you are a little hopelessly underwhelming. When trying to stop said river of lava you feel like Jack Sparrow trying to pour water out of his sinking ship in the ONLY Pirates film. Or when you're trying to construct a seabreak, where your pitiful amount of earth spreads out under gravity to form nice little dunes. It is one of the rare occasions where you curse a game's physics for being too good, as the water rushes over and swallows your village, probably giving you the finger as it does so.
Yet when you do start getting your powers, the tides begin to turn. Quite literally. Among these powers is the ability to jellify water, turning water solid and allowing it to be manipulated as such (my first use of which was to emboss a giant phallus onto the ocean). You can also evaporate water, or destroy it entirely, and with the other various powers you can earn on your quest to destroy the ocean you slowly but surely shape the earth to your will.
The main problem with From Dust is its length. I finished the game in two sittings, and that was only because an army of moths invaded my study, presumably followed by magpies and flying kids with ADD. There are only 13 levels, including the tutorial, and the last level is a sandbox (which I managed to fail). The remaining 11 levels manage to increase the difficulty with the inclusion of new environmental hazards, such as trees that set fire to themselves, some levels are secretly very linear. Or annoying. God-games are all about freedom, the ability to choose and create your own paths which which to complete the objective, your limits the obstacles and your own creativity. Some levels offer so many paths to complete your objective you don't know where to begin, and others punish you mercilessly for walking an inch out of line. Yet you can't tell which ones initially. The game waits, like a fat guy at a frat party waiting for the girls to get drunk, and when you're a decent way into the level it strikes like a Jack-in-the-box to the face, Jack replaced with a fist made out of solid hurt.
Case-in-point: The second-to-last level is set inside the crater of an old volcano, with lava rising from the middle and four villages to reclaim. Having very carefully sculpted the lava's path to not destroy any villages I managed to reclaim three of the four villages, when the game decides to announce that lava is now pouring in from everywhere, and the lovely forest that I'd cultivated in the crater base is now on fire and about to destroy my villages. With pretty much every other event there is a timer, so you know how long you have until your potential armageddon arrives and you can take measures to prevent it. With this I was just expected to know that I had to move the villages onto the safe side of the volcano I'd created, or use lava to raise the village grounds before reclaiming. I could have could have also reclaimed the music of repelling fire and lava from a stone of knowledge to prevent the disaster, but that was made impossible due to the apalling pathfinding. After extensive study of their language, I managed to translate what they were saying on their journies. "Hmm, there's a giant stream of lava blocking a direct route, no biggie, just edge around it. Oh, there's a foot-deep stream of water, definitely drowning hazard, best avoid closely as possible. There we go, all clear- OH SHIT! a ROCK! Screw this route man, too dangerous. I ain't risking my life over no rock, it's got sharp edges n' stuff!"
Yet despite the frequent bouts of tedium, the appalling pathfinding and awkward mouse controls (this game is a very poor port from console) it remains immensely-enjoyable, if not as a god-game, but as a fluids simulator if anything. That lava stream you created that drowned the village? You caused that, just to see how the lava so magnificently changes course. To see how the rivers erode the earth, form channels and deltas and deposit sediment at their bases. Despite being developed by one of the largest game studios in the world, it looks, feels and plays like an indie game, which is more than can be said of most indie games out there.
Graphics : 9/10
Gameplay : 8/10
Technical: 4/10
Total : 7/10
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Topic: [Review] From Dust (Read 2699 times)