From Dust – First Impressions / Review

I played From Dust today. Here is my impressions:

If you hate console ports not being ported, don’t buy it. The controls are super-bad, super-controller.

And what you can expect from damn Ubisoft: I CAN NOT EVEN SKIP THE DAMN CUTSCENES. Ever play the first level again? Hell yeah, watch the 2 minutes nothing-happening intro video again! No chance to skip, window-mode-hide or alt-tab-wait. Be annoyed by the nothing happening you already know!

In-game they think (or know?) you are stupid. One message box tells you something, you click, or rather press – as your mouse does not work for anything like that – it away and a second one in the top right tells you the SAME DAMN THING AGAIN. Now you close that one with spacebar of course, not the key you used for the other one.

Zooming is just as flawed. It is totally limited, utterly bad in controls. You can use TAB to toggle between min and max. And you can use the mousewheel to scroll. It’s not that far anyway – something like 2 levels of zoom. Black and White had an awesome zoom out of your entire island thing – forget that. You will be annoyed by volcano-rock right in front of your camera, blocking your sight and making you feel claustrophobic the entire round. And the zoom in? Well, you will not be able to spot details. You can however use the separate F key to zoom in on a specific tribe-person – so close you will not be able to see anything else. I don’t get how you can fuck up camera controls so badly, making it so utterly frustrating. Obviously no polish and no second evaluations went in to this Game.

And that’s also what my résumé is: Great concept, but not polished. 15 €? Don’t buy it. Maybe after some patches, or for 8 €. (The 15 € is 30 % more expensive than rest of world by the way.)

I don’t think Ubisoft ever did good community or after-release support, did they? I only know I hate them for their constant fuck-you-customer policy, customer-protection (they name copy protection; but it more like protects them from customers with bullshit always-online and whatnot). Oh while we’re at it, launching it from Steam I suddenly had an Ubi-Launcher open by the way. I was surprised. It patched the game again and then I had to log in to an Ubi account. In-game you can (have to) then use profiles as well.

Anyway, my razer hydra sadly did not work – that controller-like may feel better in that bad way, but well. I ended up trying a level twice and failed, then quit. That’s when I tried the first level again, see intro-/cutscene-note above. Seems the levels very suddenly got harder as I had no problems before that whatsoever.