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Dustborn at a Glance
| Category? | Our rating (out of 10)? | Comment? |
|---|---|---|
| Graphics | 8 | Dustborn has a distinct visual style that is pleasing to the eye. |
| Gameplay? | 4 | While we can praise Dustborn’s attempted variety, the combat and minigames are poor quality. |
| Story? | 7 | The main narrative of Dustborn is the reason to keep playing, and it keeps you engaged through strong writing. |
| Replayability? | 4 | Dustborn is a single-player adventure game with a linear narrative, leaving little in the way of replay value. |
| Overall? | 5.75? | Despite its good looks and compelling narrative, Dustborn falters as a traditional video game experience making it hard to wholeheartedly recommend.? |
The best moments of Dustborn are the ones where I hardly touched the controller. Every time the crew parked the bus and sat around a campfire to unwind after a long day of travel, combat, and morality tests, the heart and soul of this experience shone through.
It’s unfortunate, however, that the quality of everything surrounding these moments falls so short. This doesn’t just hurt the pacing; it even undercuts some of the themes and power this story wants to deliver. Our Dustborn game review goes over the highs and the lows of a title that’s constantly at odds with itself.
Like most great road trips, my first thoughts will be on the personal moments shared between friends and relaxing. However, those moments were just a small fraction of the entire experience and prevented me from fully recommending you hop aboard this bus with the Dustborn release date mere days away.
The Power of Words
You could easily be forgiven for thinking Dustborn was part of the Life is Strange series. It follows the same adventure game formula of walking around environments, speaking to characters, and making decisions that have a lasting impact on the story and others’ behavior.
The narrative twist here is that this alternate version of 2030 is one in which the United States is no longer and is now broken into six distinct regions under the new name of The Republic. This was mainly caused by something called The Broadcast, which is also where a select group of people gained a power called Vox.
Pax, your main character, and several of your companions each have their own Vox powers that mark them as outcasts in society. Dustborn picks up after the core group has come together and pulled off a heist to steal and transport a package all the way from the West Coast to Nova Scotia under the cover of being a touring rock band. If they can succeed, they will have enough cash to start life fresh away from The Republic.
Getting to know your growing band of Dustborn characters and why they are risking it all is the highlight of the experience. The game doesn’t overburden you with an exposition on the past of the world or its characters and instead lets all that history reveal itself through natural conversation. You genuinely feel as though you are building a bond with these people over the course of your trip as they slowly open up to you over time.
I thoroughly enjoyed the relationship system with your other characters, in which your dialog options don’t have simple binary effects of improving or diminishing your relationship with them. Each of your crew has three different ideologies that you can push them toward, such as Ok Boss, Ok Buddy, and Ok Dad. The first leads to a more authoritative character, the second a more cooperative, and the last a paternal and protective character.
It feels less “gamey” than most systems since none are good or bad.
As strong as the micro-stories you share with the characters are, the larger picture of the world and themes are not as solid. The overall message of words having power is great in concept but not always executed to its highest potential.
Small things like having powers called “Trigger” and “Gaslight” caused me to roll my eyes, but the game loses all sense of subtlety when it introduces things called Echoes. These are pockets of disinformation that can influence people’s thoughts that you need to rip out using a fishing-like mini-game.
Reducing hate, prejudice, and judgment to an outside force that can be cured with a magical tool feels reductive and antithetical to the underlying message of using words to overcome differences.
Not Ready to Rock
Where Dustborn breaks away from the traditional adventure game format in its myriad of gameplay mechanics. These primarily include basic third-person combat, a rhythm game, and a host of minigames.
Fighting waves of enemies in small arenas with your bat is the most frequent of these and is also the weakest. I found it dull at best and frustrating at worst. Thankfully, you do have the option to reduce the amount and difficulty of combat after you are introduced to it, but you can’t cut it out completely. It’s easily the worst part of the game and distracts from its more innovative ideas.
Nothing about hitting enemies with a bat is satisfying. Movement is stiff, you’re locked into animations, and feedback is nearly nonexistent. It feels like swinging a pool noodle at inflatable dummies over and over until they eventually get knocked over, and you have to wait for them to get up.
You can incorporate your Vox into combat to do things like knock enemies over, similar to Skyrim’s Fus-Ro-Dah, or buff your strength by “Triggering” yourself, but nothing can save the moment-to-moment feel from being so unappealing.
The entire road trip is plotted out based on various gigs your fake band is meant to play to keep up their cover, so actually performing is another key mechanic. This one fares much better since it relies on the tried and true rhythm game system of buttons running along a track that you need to press in time.
The layout of buttons streaming toward a center ring via four cardinal directions isn’t ideal, however. It makes it much harder to gauge which order you need to press the incoming notes as they stream from up, down, left, and right simultaneously and in various patterns. The Dustborn game experience tries to keep things varied, but its mechanics aren’t strong enough to sustain.
Minigames break up stretches where you’re exploring new locations and talking with characters and can be laughably low-budget. One where you are throwing Molotov cocktails from the back of a motorcycle has all the polish and quality of Ride to Hell Retribution, which is not a comparison I make lightly.
The Bottom Line
Dustborn is too ambitious for its own good. While the style and presentation are solid, it is clear that this game was never meant to do the things it is attempting to do. Stiff movement and canned animations are fine for walking and talking but buckle and break when asked to support a fast and responsive action sequence.
Had the game been more confident in itself and the player to pick up on the themes and metaphors regarding Vox and the state of the world, as well as the strength of its characters to carry the game without hitting something with a bat, it would’ve been far stronger for it.
In the end, we get a game that feels like a song with great lyrics but too many instruments playing out of time with one another. You’ll fall in love with these characters when you can sit back and listen to them banter among themselves but struggle to stay invested in the spaces between. If you’ve learned anything from our Dustborn review, it’s that sometimes it’s better to excel in a few key areas rather than be a master of none.
