From Dust Review

I remember the E3 video of From Dust giving journalists massive erections over what its game would be. The video showed us apocalyptic tsunamis and lava-ly lava; we would play God or something; and there would be these brown, half-naked, masked, aboriginal people who would definitely worship us; and the game was being made by a French games designer everyone called "Eric Chahi" (because that was his name). The journalists' loins were throbbing.

And now we finally have The Game: From Dust! Or I finally have it. It was released for XBLA in July of 2011, to a metacritic score of 80 (which is a good score, by the way). There's a PC version, but it got bad reviews, thus I got the XBLA copy. And man -- did this game blow me away!

With boredom.

I believe From Dust wants to be a sandbox more than a game (my favorite piece of evidence is that the final level in Story Mode gives you incredible powers -- for example, 'make a tsunami' -- and then tells you do whatever you want. I opted for deleting the game).

And when I say 'sandbox,' I literally mean: you're going to pick up and drop lots of sand, within levels that are boxes (with invisible borders). With this sand you build levees and land bridges and make plants grow (From Dust's plants grow on sand). You can also pick up water and lava, the water-grabbing useful primarily for getting rid of the water and putting out fires, and the lava-grabbing useful for forming solid land and killing your people in frustration. You can also pick up trees that give water, fire, and explode.

Your goals in the Story Mode levels are to raise villages around each level's totems and then send five villagers to a hideous Easter Island statue and meet them there, where you'll see the same level-ending cinematic every time. With the exception of the final level, which has no ending.

One of the reasons I didn't want to finish the Story Mode (although I did for this review) was because of the "story." Most of it is told in readings you unlock, and they are basically a trite history about From Dust's characterless world. And I say "characterless" because the game has no real characters, no personalities, and nothing interesting to say about you, anyone you know, or anyone you're bound to know. It's so crap that it almost makes me angry. Did Ubisoft really think a thinking person would want to read a fake history about a non-personality? I have to yell it: THERE ARE NO CHARACTERS IN THE GAME!

Are we supposed to care about From Dust's people because they are brown, didgeridoo-playing aboriginees, as if this were a substitute for an actual cultural exchange (and characters)? Hint: no. Although if Ubisoft intended for the "cultural" part then I want to call out their game for being racist, as the game's people have the pathfinding of retards.

"Why can't you guys just take the short route?!" I say to these idiots I've sent to a totem. "The game says you can! Why are you taking the long way?!!"

Then one of my villages starts screaming for some reason (a flood-warning has appeared over their town symbol). I move the camera over to the place, which takes four seconds longer than it should. I inspect the town and see not a drop of liquid, which may have to do with the PlayStation 2-quality textures, or maybe just incomplete liquids-on-solids work.

Then I hear another complaint. It's from the people I sent off to colonize that totem. I pan to their position. This time the camera takes an annoying amount of time to adjust, as I end up having to fiddle with controls I'm noticing too much; the camera keeps moving my view into awkward positions; I'm wanting a mouse and a keyboard! Finally I have the camera angle I want, and the people are literally making bird noises about how they can't proceed because of lava that suddenly flowed into the longer path they chose...

I pick up this lava, or at first I try to pick up this lava. It's difficult to get your cursor, which is always in the middle of the screen, to the exact location of the small thing you want to pick up. Even more annoying is that the cursor, when not being moved, moves by itself around in a circle like a worm (it actually resembles a worm), so it's hard to immediately tell what the cursor is directly over because the cursor's worm body only forms a semi-circle, and it keeps moving! The other option for grabbing small things is to just try to grab it, pulling on the left trigger again and again, until you get it.

So twenty seconds later I get that bit of lava out of the way. Then I wait a minute for the fools to get to the totem where they will summon up a village from the Earth.

Waiting Waiting Waiting. There's too much waiting in the Story Mode. It got to the point where I left the game running and went to the kitchen, coming back with food so that I'd have something to do.

Perhaps the game thinks we'll be interested in its liquid effects. And okay, the tsunamis and lava look cool when they wrap around a town (or destroy one). Also cool: seeing an island form from a volcano. I'm just kidding of course. It's actually kind of boring. As I watched it I thought, "Wow, that liquid is good coding work! Why aren't I doing something else with my life?!"

The Challenge Mode levels are not as boring as the Story Mode ones because they immediately put you in the action, the kind where you're given goal, there's a threat coming to ruin everything in a matter of seconds, and you must quickly figure out what to do and do it. One of these levels, for example, has you escort people across a bunch of waterfalls; you must pick up water that intermittently flows down those waterfalls, preventing the people from being swept away as they hike towards their destination. Your completion time gets recorded for the leaderboards. These challenges, in theory, would be fun, but what they really do is highlight how crap the controls and the camera are (this is called a broken interface).

You can bore yourself with From Dust for fifteen dollars.

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆