Review: From Dust

The second game in Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade promotion this was From Dust, which is a God Sim and so I just had to play it.

You are, shockingly, a god and must help a tribe travel to something called The Sanctuary. You do this through various powers such as raising and lowering land and moving water and lava. The star of the show is the landscape engine. Move a pile of dirt and it will flow neatly into a hill. Water will carve channels through the dirt to form rivers, but if you drop some lava and it will set into rock that will be a lot more robust. Your goal is to settle all the villages in each land, of which there will be a maximum of four, and each village will give you a new power. You can also collect repel water and lava powers that are flown as kites above the villages and these are very important to keep your villages alive. Once you have all the villages populated the exit lights up and you have to send some people there to end the level.

It all sounds very simple, and honestly it is. You might have to build some more islands to get them where they need to go, or build some defences against tidal waves which seem to happen every few minutes on some levels. You also need to manage lava and deal with the fact that it tends to set plants on fire, which causes out of control wildfires.

At its heart it’s a game wanting to be the world manipulation from populous, and it does this very well. Graphically it’s great, the atmosphere is spot on and using lava to create a breakwater to protect a village is immensely satisfying. The cracks start to show with the game though as the building is a bit too limited because of the task at hand, and rushing to grab villages isn’t nearly as hard as it could be even when you are diverting streams or massive lava flows.

At the end the game gives you a final level where the gloves are taken off and you get to place the villages as well as creating land, water and lava from out of thin air. This is a disappointing moment as you realise that when you are given the freedom to do anything all you need to is place four villages and then hold out against a collapsing island until an amount of time has elapsed. I’m not sure what I would have preferred, but I think it needs some more conflict instead of being against the environment.

As you complete each map you unlock challenges that go a bit further towards being an interesting game, but at the end it feels like a tech demo that has gotten a bit out of control, but it’s still worth playing if only for the experience. It feels like a stepping stone for an engine before a real game is added and the engine is more than ready for the challenge. I somehow managed to come away very disappointed that it never really goes anywhere and somewhat relieved that people can still experiment with games in this way. Take a look at the demo, and if you enjoy what you see and accept that there’s only a few days play in the game and it never really expands much beyond the first few levels then it’s an enjoyable way to try something new.

The game is out now on Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 points, and will show up for PC and PS3 over the next few months.