Review - From Dust (PC)

From Dust is a strategy game in which you control a tribal deity named the Breath, with the ability to manipulate the environment by absorbing and then releasing certain materials.  Your goal is to help protect the tribe while they set up villages around totems placed throughout the map.  Once you have occupied each village on a level, the entrance to the next area opens and the level ends.

Gameplay:

The Breath has the ability to absorb and release materials such as water, dirt, lava and trees.  You will also gain a new ability for each village your tribe creates.  These abilities include being able to jellify water, put out fires, summon black holes to absorb material without having to release it somewhere, and conjuring earth out of thin air.  Using these abilities, you need to provide paths to all the totems and the exit so that your tribe can actually build the villages to advance in the story as well as to protect your tribe from things such as tsunamis, high tides, volcano eruptions, wildfire and such.

The game started off great, with impressive physics and interesting abilities.  I was very impressed with the way waves crash through the terrain, or watching the lava I placed cool down and create a stone barrier.  The very first time I used the Jellify Water ability, I watched a tsunami wave freeze seconds before washing away my villagers, giving them enough time to walk across before the ability ran out.  The game does a great job introducing these new abilities to you, though like any new toy, once the novelty wore off, so does the fun.  The gameplay eventually became nothing more than moving more and more materials around to build walls or bridges and less about using all the abilities you possess in conjunction with each other.

Controls:

One of the first issues I had with the game was the control scheme.  To pan the map, you can either use WASD or move your cursor towards the edge of the screen.  WASD effectively pans the map while having your cursor stay in the middle of the screen.  The inner box in which you can move your cursor without panning the screen was too small, and you end up having to fight against the panning while you're trying to distribute materials in a specific location.  I ended up having to use a combination of both mouse and keyboard just to control the cursor, which wasn't as intuitive as I would've liked it to be.  WASD is easy enough to use, though it doesn't allow for very precise placement.  Once you start using the mouse, the camera panning is a bit too sensitive, and you easily overdraw your mark or the camera slowly pans while you're struggling to absorb and release materials before your villages are destroyed.  This might seem like a pretty minor gripe, but when 80% of your time is spent moving dirt from one part of the map to another, having to fight with the control constantly becomes more than just a minor annoyance.

Level Design:

Each map in the story mode feels a bit too small.  The game starts off very easily, and your initial tasks involve creating bridges out of dirt to connect islands together so that your tribe can build villages.  As the game progresses and you gain new abilities, the complexity of the tasks increase as well, and by the end of the game, each map will take half an hour to an hour to complete.  This seems like a good thing since the story mode only contains 10 or so maps, but the longer maps usually just mean having to move more materials around.  Instead of building a small bridge to connect two islands that are close together, you'll have to build large valleys that span the entire map so that the lava will flow away from your villages or erect large walls around the island to keep the tides from washing away your villages.  This is very time consuming and tedious.

Despite being an all-powerful deity with the power to change the world around you, you never feel much like a god.  The levels tend to be very restrictive and play out like a puzzle game.  There's not quite as much freedom as you'd like; the developers clearly had a set solution for each level and they want the player to follow that solution to reach the end.  While playing through the story mode, you will unlock maps for the challenge mode, which effectively turns the game even more into a puzzler and less like an open world sim game.  The challenge mode is far less tedious though, and does add a bit of life to the already short game.  Sadly, the one mode I wish they did throw in would be an open world mode, with random environmental catastrophes and a large map to do as you please.

Conclusion:

The game does a great job implementing your abilities, and you'll find lots of moments throughout the game where you can't help but go "WOW! That's pretty cool!"  Unfortunately, I found that once the novelty of being a god wore off, the game stopped being as fun.  The environmental challenges you'll face are preset and scripted, and once you realize the solution, the rest of the map is just moving all the materials into the right place.  I wish the developers embraced more of what makes playing as a god so great, and that's being able to do what you want.  The game has a lot of very unique concepts, though I feel a bit disappointed because there is so much potential there, just a bit lacking in the execution.

Score: 7/10