From Dust comes out tomorrow on the Xbox Live Arcade, and it will be out on PC next month. It's a game that looks amazing in screenshots and videos, but when you sit down and the play the thing a number of small annoyances pile up to obscure the interesting concepts.

You play an entity that nameless people invoke in order to bring them to new lands, and you look like a glow worm that zooms above the elements. You can pick up dirt, water, and lava and transport them to other areas of the game board and dump them to change the environment. You can create paths for your little guys, make new land for plants to grow, or stop the flow of molten rock. Sadly, I've often had more fun in my sandbox.

The camera shuffles between being too close to the action and too far away, making it hard to keep track of the location of your people. It can also be tricky to dump your collected dirt where it needs to go with any amount of precision. There isn't much interaction with the people you're trying to protect and guide, as you simply tell them where to go and try to keep them safe. If you fail in your job, they can be washed away or destroyed, but it never feels like there's much at stake.

It's not like we're immune to the pleasures of passively controlling the lives and deaths of tiny people—see also Lemmings, Populous, and SimCity—but this game lacks the charm of those titles. Your job consists of being a magical bulldozer, and that gets old quickly.

There are more complicated play mechanics that come into the game as you advance through the stages, but instead of gelling together into a cohesive experience, it begins to feel like one thing after another. When things became frantic I often felt like I was fighting against the camera and physics engine as much as I was trying to solve each puzzle or save my tribespeople.

This isn't a bad game, and there is a demo available if you'd like to try it, but it simply lacks the polish that would make it a good game. It's as if someone created a beautiful sculpture but didn't understand how to breathe life into it. From Dust is still more interesting than most games on the market, and it's certainly worth trying, but it falters when delivering the game's mechanics and never completely recovers.