From Dust
From Dust is a “God Game”/puzzler game that came out on July 27th, released by Ubisoft as part of the Xbox Live Summer of Arcade on the 360 for 1,200 MSP, and is going to be released in August on the PC on Steam.
From Dust is an amazing, but short, game. The game starts you out with easy puzzles that don’t take very long to beat, but then slowly gets harder as the missions go on.
You may have noticed I put God Game in quotes. In my opinion, it doesn’t really feel like a god game. You play this being called The Breath, who in the eyes of the villagers, is a god. And you get powers to throw around too, but that’s as far as it goes into the God Game genre. It’s far from games like Populous and Black & white.
From Dust
Gameplay: The objective of From Dust is to populate each of the Totems, and protect them from the elements, scattered across a map, and side missions are to spread the vegetation, and collect memory fragments. Sometimes this can be really easy, but other times it can be hard. (The last map, for example, is super hard in regards to spreading vegetation. But I won’t go any farther there for the sake of spoilers.) On most maps, each Totem has a power tied to it, be it Jellify Water, Put out Fire, Amplify the Breath, and more. I will explain what at least these 3 do in a later section. The villages themselves even get some powers (Only two, compared to The Breath’s 6 total.)
Controls: They didn’t feel too well. The camera was weird, and took awhile to get used to. The options to invert the camera seemed to do nothing at all.
Sound: At one point in my game, the sound vanished. But over all, from what I heard of it, the sounds are really nice. Not too loud, not too quiet. Very relaxing at some points.
Graphics: The graphics look amazing, to me. There are some issues with pop up with vegetation, but overall I think they look really nice. Some people think they suck, but they’re just graphic whores ;P
Powers: The powers are really fun to use. Jellify Water will just turn all water into, well, Jelly. You can then pretend you are Noah and start parting the water to let your villagers get across. It is also fun to just build a giant water tower and watch it fall and send waves out in every direction. I’ve destroyed many villages doing that… Put out Fire also does what its name suggests. It will put out any fire thats raging on the map for a limited time. And finally, Amplify the Breath will let the player pick up more dirt, lava, or water. There are 3 more powers out there, but I shall leave that to you to play the game and find out what they are, or you can cheat and google it. Cheater.
Replayablity: Moderate-Highly Moderate. With how you can go back through and replay maps to try and do something different, and with the option to complete Challenge Maps (Which I find extremely fun.), I’d have to say that there is a good replay value to From Dust.
No Comments