Cleo's Lost Idols

Until quite recently in our history, human power was the only available method when it came to erecting buildings or transforming landscapes into habitable environments. Naturally, people came up with a variety of ingenious ways to achieve seemingly impossible feats, such as moving huge blocks of stone from one place to the other without the aid of machinery.

Cleo's Lost Idols is an interesting puzzle game with strategy elements, in which the goal is to use a team of people to rebuild structures. However, there are all sorts of traps and obstacles to overcome in order for the people to do their job, so it’s important to carefully plan your strategy beforehand. Not only that, but the physics engine is designed to be one of the cornerstones of the gameplay as well.

In short, you have to click on things and watch your team rush to them across the map. Once obstacles enter the picture, on the other hand, you have to come up with solutions to work around them, such as pushing boulders on a specific path, or creating bridges for your workers to use. Unfortunately, there are a few flaws in the game as well, which is why frustration might kick in rather quickly.

The first one of these flaws is the fact that you have to manually guide the boulders to their destination, but the controls are atrocious. You are supposed to use both the mouse and the keyboard, but it’s very difficult to stick to a direction once the ball starts rolling. On top of that, the camera controls are pretty terrible as well, mainly because it’s difficult to get the proper angle when you need it the most.

As for the graphics, they are pretty nice for a free casual game, especially since the maps are fully three-dimensional, which means that you can zoom in and out as you please, as well as rotate the view however you want. Granted, the object quality is far from impressive, but the art style as a whole is pretty nice and colorful. Lastly, it must be noted that the sound effects are incredibly annoying, especially the dialog, which is actually just gibberish repeated ad infinitum.

In the end, Cleo's Lost Idols is not a bad game, and it has some interesting ideas when it comes to the gameplay. However, the terrible controls take their toll on the players, especially since sometimes they have to perform very precise movements.