Quick Shots: From Dust

Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 06 September 2011 08:14

Entertainment

Raise a tribe from the stuff-of-stars and send them on a journey of discovery

 

From Dust launches players into god mode, allowing them to become a deity for a day in a game that has lofty mystic aims.  

As the title says, the plan here is to guide the first stumbling steps of a tribe of men, coming to life out of nothing more than the desert sand.  

Your guidance however is not direct, like games such as Black and White, your god-like influence is directed through an on-screen cursor wiggly-thing known as the Breath.

Using the Breath the player is able to scoop up material on the landscape, and transport it elsewhere on the map.  The idea is to manipulate the land to form bridges across the water, plug or redirect the course of rivers or magma in order to allow the little tribesman access to totems and other map hotspots so they can build their civilization.

The game does a great job of giving you almost god like abilities but not sovereign control of either the world or the people in it.  Your land bridges will be eroded by rushing water, your tribe will often blunder into mortal danger and quite often (probably more often than it needs to) a ticking clock will pressure you into making decisions quickly.

On that, the game does a reasonable job of keeping on your sandaled god toes ramping up the difficultly quite steeply in the second half of the game.  From here on you may curse your choice of platform for the game, I played on the Xbox 360 and certainly this Real Time Strategy game looks great but is difficult to control without keyboard and mouse.

Pick this game up on PC (via steam) and watch out for those grass loin-cloth burning fire trees.

 

Recommendation : Half a bucket of drool