Caltrops - I Can't Afford a XBL Gold Membership - This game turned out to be pretty awesome

Forum Overview :: I Can't Afford a XBL Gold Membership

by Bananadine 01/18/2012, 9:06am PST

At first I was disappointed with it because I'd watched those preview videos where the living world is being intricately reworked in real time and thought, "Is this where games will go next?????" And I was a kid when I played Populous so I was very impressed with that, and this was supposed to be something like Populous. Then I played it and it turned out that all that 3D real-time fluid control they give you, cool as it is, is just too sloppy to do anything very complex with, and that the little humans in the game were little more than hit points for your village sites which you can't even create or destroy, and that the goal in the game was not to develop or conquer the world so much as to move little uncontrollable people from one end of the map to the other. So basically it's Lemmings. And I've played Lemmings a bunch of times already. :(

But over time, the game won me over because Lemmings is awesome, and when you add gorgeously rendered fluid physics to it it gets at least a little better. And even though the goal is just to get the thing from the place to the other place, you do develop the world as you go. It's like, Lemmings where everything you do is either a really pretty success or a really pretty failure that just ends up being a new, perfectly solvable puzzle. Because the game is almost always easy, once you learn a few basic strategies. But it's like Mario--even though the puzzles are simple, it's still fun enough to just do stuff with the engine that you can enjoy them anyway. The dynamic world is too dynamic to be controlled well by the tools they give you, but that doesn't mean the dynamicism ends up being superfluous eye candy. It's like in Civilization where, no matter what happens or how well you do, the world is always this huge evolving mess that is strongly characterized by a long series of decisions you have made. You aren't exactly doing that holy grail-of-gaming thing of being a full participant in a real story, but you're working in an interesting, complicated place that shows its history well, which is a decent compromise. So this is a difference from Lemmings, after all: In that game you can blow out a big chunk of dirt and ruin your chance of reaching the goal, whereupon the game starts you over, which is a bit of a punishment; but in From Dust, any big hole you make will fill with some sort of fluid and become a new thing, and then, even if your action ruined your original effort to reach the goal, you can just make a new, interestingly different effort, because the game kept up with you and is still playing along!!! This isn't a huge deal, because all the holes and hills you make in this game are just new anonymous messes of the same few materials as always, but it's a significant and satisfying increase in interactivity beyond the nearest thing I'd seen before anyhow. Plus it looks so awesome.

sdroa jists wrote:

I had actually watched some asshole's youtube review, I mean it wasn't bad or anything but basically he complained about how there were too many strict time limits in the game but that just isn't true.

Yeah that's dumb. You only have to survive whatever disaster, which is easy, and then you know how to survive it the next time, and then there's no more time limit anymore.

sdroa jists wrote:

occasionally you might notice how flat the edges of the water is (are?) when it forms a tsunami or when jellified and piled up into a tower, but that's the worst of it.

sdroa jists wrote:

some other issues you might have tho: lava instantly forms rock layers from top to bottom, one of the challenge modes takes advantage of this "exploit" where you have to pour a giant protective crater of rock around a village, whatever it's not a big deal.

Yeah they messed up with the challenge mode thing. The main stages do a really nice job of introducing you to stuff and hiding the engine's few rough edges, and then the challenge modes give you these stupidly artificial-looking islands in the middle of nowhere (so that there's no far-off background landscape to distract your eyes from the ugly square edges of the dynamic part of the sea) and a few of them pick out the most immersion-breaking tricks you can play, like instantly turning columns of dirt into rock or magically putting out fire by changing the dirt under it slightly, and rub them in your face. And most were too easy or too awkward. But the engine is so cool that I still had fun with them.

Also weird: They made a big thing about the "animals" you can summon by nurturing plants, but the animals are completely insignificant. I had to really zoom in to even confirm that they were doing anything more than just drifting around randomly. And the special plants were often unnecessary and hard to use... it seems like this game was sort of unfinished. Or like they finished building it but then didn't bother to remove all the scaffolding. But whatever, it's good enough.