Dusty Prospect
From Dust centres around the player as ‘the breath’, a god-like force of nature able to control the world around it, and has them manipulating the environment to claim a number of villages before exiting to the next area. It’s a very interesting concept and brings a type of game play to consoles that hasn’t really been done before. It’s a fun game with good level designs that, although lacking in places, ends up being a fairly decent prospect.
The essential mechanic here is that you can pick up and drop various substances, earth, water, and lava, to help villagers reach and occupy new villages. It is reminiscent of lemmings and populace as the player has to help guide these people without ever having direct control over them. Many obstacles and dangers are present to prevent the villagers achieving their goal, you’ll have to avoid lava flows, redirect rivers, defend against tsunamis and deal with volcanoes, but the game has many tools under its belt to help control most of these. Each village has a Totem at the centre with special powers that can be activated with a quick tap of the D pad. A nice mechanic that lets the designers get a bit more outrageous with their level designs and adds a degree of complexity and skill.
Playing around in this world with all the tools at your fingertips is just fun. The best part of this game, by far, is sitting back, relaxed, and playing with the different elements at your disposal. Each acts in its own unique way and when two materials interact with each other they have logical effects that are fun to play with. A large part of what makes this so fun is that the technology at work here is just fantastic. Water and lava look amazing and flow incredibly realistically, it might be some of the best video game water I’ve seen, and the dirt settles and moves around like real dirt would.
Both the visuals and the game play help to make the story mode mentally stimulating but also very relaxing. The only downside for me is the story, which had a fairly decent setup but ultimately failed to deliver on what it was trying to achieve. Really I felt it to be a very lacklustre ending that build up to a point of excitement and then immediately took it all away and left me feeling flat.
Story, though important, isn’t really the focus of the game but unfortunately the challenge mode, a series of maps with specific goals, don’t help either. As stated previously in the review using these materials is fun but the challenge maps ramped up the difficulty significantly and that highlighted the real problem; the controls. Though they’re fine during the relatively stress free story mode as soon as they ask you to do anything taxing it becomes all too apparent how clumsy they are. Generally it’s hard to do things accurately quickly that, although I haven’t played the PC version, I can’t help but think would be made easier with mouse controls. Ironically the controls may be better on PC but with a lack of similar content on consoles it might actually be a better value proposition there.
Despite the disappointing story and fiddly controls From Dust is still a good game if you can see through these points. The style is unique and interesting and there’s some fairly good voiceover work despite the disappointing story. Really it comes down to the game play just being fun and I happily spent an hour or more messing around in a kind of sandbox map that opened up towards the end. If you’re itching to play this kind of sandbox god game it’s probably worth picking up but caution is advised.