We’re not joking we were actually desperate enough to try and tackle Captain America as a review but we couldn’t get over a three word count after all why drag something over eight hundred words when ‘It is sh*te’ can sum it up just as well! However we do have to thank the folk behind the game because if they hadn’t made something as woeful as it we might not have returned it and bought some Live points and found the hidden gem called From Dust.
Console: Xbox 360/ PlayStation 3/ PC /
Players: Single Player
Release Date: 22nd April 2011
Developers: Ubisoft Montpellier
Publishers: Ubisoft
Genre: Sandbox God Game, Puzzle
Price: 1200 Live Points
Before we kick things off with our review we should let you know that we sort of have an ego, yes it’s hard to imagine the arcade with an ego but we have a SERIOUS God complex… nothing gives us more please than dictating the daily happenings in the lives of lesser pixels so we automatically have a place in our benevolent little gamer hearts for anything that feeds our need for control…The Sims, Black and White, Sim City, Tamagotchis… you name it and we’ve controlled/played it.
From Dust is brought to us by French video game designer Eric Chahi, the same guy behind ‘Heart of Darkness’ and legendary video game ‘Another World’. Taking inspiration from our of favourite games of all time ‘Populous’ as well as his own previous work, Chahi creates a world in which you play God or the ‘Breath’ a being capable of not only shaping the lives of the people who worship but of also moulding the very world on which they walk upon.
As the deity worshipped by the nomadic tribes you must do all that is in your power to guide these people from world to world, solving unique problems along the way while also unlocking new powers and abilities.
Moving balls of Sand is actually quite therapeutic…
The game is a visual feast, with a crisp clear and beautifully designed natural landscape for you to tinker with to your heart’s content. While there are issues with the PC version of the game including a limited frame rate and anti aliasing alongside the lack of a serious graphics engine, for the most part we were quite happy to sit and paw the television screen as we ogled the pretty pictures displayed by From Dust. Music and sound effects are nothing to write home or on the @rcade about so we can’t really complain about nor can we sing their praises either.
As we’ve said above, you are God or the Breath and the game is centred on you helping your nomadic people reach ancient temples that unlock secrets to the next world. This not always just as simple as clicking on a temple and letting do their thing, there are challenges involved; from creating bridges to draining entire lakes, you will have to manipulate everything around you if you’re to solve the mysteries left behind by the Ancients.
These are the poor souls at the mercy of your divine wrath!
Now at first we were happy to sit there and do this but quickly found the issue of reaching the temples to be kind of simple (it’s not hard when you’ve imagine having God powers you’re entire life to be honest!) and we even figured we could reach the goal of covering the land we created in rich flora and fauna (doing so is a secondary challenge that unlocks stories and artwork etc.) and after we’d done that we were still content to stay on each level shaping it as we deemed fit well after we had completed every task… why? Because it looked really pretty!
However because of our incessant desire to screw up the lives of our worshippers by redirecting a river through the middle of their village we came to realise two HUGE problems with the game!
No lava isn’t one of the problems… it’s a solution…burn it all
1 – We couldn’t care less about the story behind the missions or the entire game, it wasn’t essential to us enjoying what we were doing at all and this to us is a pretty big deal. The game does not develop properly in our mind and eventually we got really bored of our naturally amazing skills as Supreme Being.
2 – The controls are all over the bloody place! There are some issues with console play but we decided to check out From Dust on the PC and let’s just say you’d get more control out of a five year old that was fed nothing but sugar and let loose in a Teletubbie concert. It really is all over the place and even after reducing mouse sensitivity we struggled to play and perform the basic actions required to play the game.
Overall From Dust is an enjoyable game but lacks any real challenge we sort of breezed through the whole thing without any real difficulty that said we did thoroughly enjoy ourselves while messing up…err… saving our beloved worshippers. If you’re looking for something shiny to distract you until something better comes along then you could do worse than check this beauty out!
Good Points
Looks beautiful
You get to be God
Bad Points
Almost non-existent Storyline
Insanely bad controls on PC version
Rating: 78/100
