I've been waiting to shit on this game as soon as I finished playing it. There is almost a problem at every level you make take to examine this game and it all combines to just make a fucking terrible experience.
Although the game looks like an indie game at first glance, a scratch will show its true corporate nature. Well, a scratch and the in your face company specific DRM, that is something I will get back to later though. Getting some of the basics out of the way this game was developed and published by Ubisoft, the development though was done by a smaller studio within Ubisoft called Ubisoft - Montpellier. I played the game through Steam, much to the game's dismay, but it can also be played on any Xbox or PlayStation as well as through the Google Chrome store.
To put it simply, From Dust is a puzzle game where the player is put in the role of a god like figure and is tasked with guiding villagers that worship them across various hellish landscapes. Conceptually this seemed interesting to me as it reminded me of a game from my childhood called Black & White and once I actually saw the visuals of From Dust the connection was cemented since I felt the games looked really similar to one another. However, while Black & White was released slightly incomplete, From Dust seems to have been released before the game was even properly made. Beating the game itself took me less than five hours and that really wasn't a satisfying experience due to the fact that game was extremely easy. Like I said earlier, this game was labeled as a puzzle game but I feel that is a serious overestimation what is actually happening in the game itself, I just like I was completing unfinished environmental sandboxes when I go through the levels since there are multiple straight forward solutions that take almost no effort to actually accomplish. Volcanoes can be drowned with oceans, the sea pushed back with continents of sand with everything that comes between those two being even less of a challenge. I will concede that the sandbox and environmental tools in From Dust are nice and they are a cool novelty to experience but that doesn't make it a game let alone a puzzle game.
I feel pretty bad for the graphic design and sound team for From Dust though. The game looks and sounds great and reading up about the game its surprise how seriously these folks took their job. The design for the villagers was derived by studying African and Pacific people, the sounds were recorded from live locations for the oceans, volcanoes and everything in between. Its all just so aesthetically pleasing when you save your villagers by forced water to bend around them or when you lob a hill of sand to create a bridge it all looks, sounds and even feels exactly as it should. Its just a shame that the game underneath all of this is boring rendering all this effort moot and meaningless.
Aside from its internal issue of being boring the game had some operating issues that also made it quite annoying to actually play. The issue being Ubisoft forcing all players playing the game through Steam to have to launch it through Uplay. This essentially meant the player had to go through nearly three launcher before being able to actually launch the game and play and that is if they were lucky. Most of the time it actually just ended with crashing as the three launchers tried to reconcile the situation with each other essentially locking people out of their game which is pretty much unacceptable. Now, I don't mind Ubisoft having its own digital distribution platform to compete with Steam, hell I like that concept. My problem is with the utter garbage that took place with the execution here, three launchers is just three launchers to many. I would much prefer Ubisoft simply stop having their games on Steam and have them exclusively on Uplay, they just need to sack up and actually do it because the people will come, Ubisoft does make good games and a single Assassin's Creed game will be enough to drive most people to get Uplay.
This was a pretty terrible game. I got it mostly because it reminded me of Black & White, but that should have warned me as Black & White was also released a barely functioning sandbox as opposed to a game. I got through everything the game had to offer in less than five hours, but that is because all it has to offer is environmental sandbox manipulation and no matter how much you call them puzzles that doesn't make them puzzles. I concede that the game looks and sounds beautiful, but its an extremely shallow beauty with no depth whatsoever. This is of course aside from the issue with Uplay that might render the game unplayable for most people. This is of course aside from the fact the game is meaninglessly locked to run at a lower frame rate to match those of the console versions.
To put it simply, From Dust is a puzzle game where the player is put in the role of a god like figure and is tasked with guiding villagers that worship them across various hellish landscapes. Conceptually this seemed interesting to me as it reminded me of a game from my childhood called Black & White and once I actually saw the visuals of From Dust the connection was cemented since I felt the games looked really similar to one another. However, while Black & White was released slightly incomplete, From Dust seems to have been released before the game was even properly made. Beating the game itself took me less than five hours and that really wasn't a satisfying experience due to the fact that game was extremely easy. Like I said earlier, this game was labeled as a puzzle game but I feel that is a serious overestimation what is actually happening in the game itself, I just like I was completing unfinished environmental sandboxes when I go through the levels since there are multiple straight forward solutions that take almost no effort to actually accomplish. Volcanoes can be drowned with oceans, the sea pushed back with continents of sand with everything that comes between those two being even less of a challenge. I will concede that the sandbox and environmental tools in From Dust are nice and they are a cool novelty to experience but that doesn't make it a game let alone a puzzle game.
I feel pretty bad for the graphic design and sound team for From Dust though. The game looks and sounds great and reading up about the game its surprise how seriously these folks took their job. The design for the villagers was derived by studying African and Pacific people, the sounds were recorded from live locations for the oceans, volcanoes and everything in between. Its all just so aesthetically pleasing when you save your villagers by forced water to bend around them or when you lob a hill of sand to create a bridge it all looks, sounds and even feels exactly as it should. Its just a shame that the game underneath all of this is boring rendering all this effort moot and meaningless.
Aside from its internal issue of being boring the game had some operating issues that also made it quite annoying to actually play. The issue being Ubisoft forcing all players playing the game through Steam to have to launch it through Uplay. This essentially meant the player had to go through nearly three launcher before being able to actually launch the game and play and that is if they were lucky. Most of the time it actually just ended with crashing as the three launchers tried to reconcile the situation with each other essentially locking people out of their game which is pretty much unacceptable. Now, I don't mind Ubisoft having its own digital distribution platform to compete with Steam, hell I like that concept. My problem is with the utter garbage that took place with the execution here, three launchers is just three launchers to many. I would much prefer Ubisoft simply stop having their games on Steam and have them exclusively on Uplay, they just need to sack up and actually do it because the people will come, Ubisoft does make good games and a single Assassin's Creed game will be enough to drive most people to get Uplay.
This was a pretty terrible game. I got it mostly because it reminded me of Black & White, but that should have warned me as Black & White was also released a barely functioning sandbox as opposed to a game. I got through everything the game had to offer in less than five hours, but that is because all it has to offer is environmental sandbox manipulation and no matter how much you call them puzzles that doesn't make them puzzles. I concede that the game looks and sounds beautiful, but its an extremely shallow beauty with no depth whatsoever. This is of course aside from the issue with Uplay that might render the game unplayable for most people. This is of course aside from the fact the game is meaninglessly locked to run at a lower frame rate to match those of the console versions.
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