Idol Hands Review (PC)

Idol Hands is a strategy sim game that lets you play god to a handful of adorable critters, and gently nudge them toward a prosperous future, by employing your godly powers to rain destruction on their enemies.

The title comes from independent game makers Pocket Games and Fluid Games, and it belongs to the god game genre of the strategy spectrum, to sum it up.

At first glance, seeing the powers and general design, you can’t help but think about the Populous series, because that’s pretty much what started the whole genre.

Unfortunately, Idol Hands has a much smaller scope than Bullfrog’s latest entry in the series, 1998’s Populous: The Beginning, did.

In any case, omnipotence is a pretty enticing deal, and I’ll gladly jump at any opportunity to exercise my divine right and guide virtual people to greatness.

Volcanoes are the most destructive

Gameplay

A group of indigenous people come into a great plight, at which point they cast their eyes upon the sky and beg for assistance. Fortunately, you happen to be around and decide to strike a mutually beneficial deal.

In exchange for the furlings worshipping you, you agree to help them against their enemies, furlings of another color.

The furlings aren’t exactly adept at survival on their own. Without your guidance, they pretty much starve and get mauled to death.

It is your job to assign jobs to the little critters, based on your and their current needs. Thus, you make some of them farmers, so they can grow crops and feed the others, while you scout for nearby forests and iron ore.

After you locate those resources, you have more furlings play lumberjack and blacksmith. With wood and iron on the table, you can then make priests who will enhance the worship of your people, and soldiers, brave critters who engage the enemy tribes and protect the village.

The prayer level - also known as mana - dictates what abilities you are able to use, and based on how many followers you have, you will gain the resource faster, with a bonus depending on how many active priests you have.

Your abilities allow you to raise or lower land, or to flatten it for your furlings to use and build upon. More taxing powers enable you to cause earthquakes or throw lightning bolts at enemy buildings in order to set them on fire, and your ultimate ability can spawn a destructive volcano.

Now this all sounds fine and dandy on paper, but unfortunately, the game is really stripped down, with a ton of limitations.

You don’t get to directly control any of your followers, you just run to your holy stone and hit a button to create more of a certain kind of specialist.

The village is limited to a flat population of 50, 10 farmers, 10 woodcutters, 20 soldiers, 5 blacksmiths and 5 priests. If you want to get mana faster beyond the 5 priests limit, then tough luck.

The same goes for pretty much everything else. The only way to control your army is to plant a banner at a certain point on the map. If it’s within your borders, they are on protective duty.

It's all for the Furlings

If it’s outside your borders, your soldiers go there and attack whatever is near, without any sense of priority, and then continue until there is no more enemy in sight.

Now, the unbelievers are hard to slay, so you’d better arm yourself with a lot of patience. Enemy villagers will rebuild at almost the same rate you are able to destroy, which means that you’ll be spending most of your time waiting for the mana bar to fill up so you can spawn volcanoes, by far the most efficient spell, in order to take out as many buildings at a time as possible.

Unfortunately, that isn’t even remotely satisfying, as there is so little interactivity, and you’re doing the same thing over and over each mission, with the only changes in gameplay being the incoming attacks that you have to ward off by collapsing land bridges while your village grows, during the initial phase of the missions.

The enemy furlings also have their own dark god, which does the exact same things that you do, and is only dark because it’s not on your tribe’s side.

“The furlings aren’t exactly adept at survival on their own. Without your guidance, they pretty much starve and get mauled to death.”

The overall pacing is very slow and there is no way for the computer-controlled opponents to defeat you, once you get production going. After the inevitable turning point is achieved, Idol Hands becomes a tedious wait, as you pick off buildings with your godly powers, and watch the furlings cheer as they attack each other.

Add to this the fact that your followers don’t always manage to gather lumber from the trees that are clearly within their range, and things get even worse. Sure, you can always call some rain clouds and hasten nature’s course, having some trees grow out of nothing in the middle of your village, but there were already plenty of good candidates around.

And speaking of good candidates, I’m afraid Idol Hands is not going to be one to the god game crown, even in an age where the genre is seeing a prolonged drought.

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Sound and visuals

The furlings seem like a chipper bunch, much happier than I would be in their shoes, but their chirps eventually start getting on your nerves, as you wait through the same scenario time and time again, with little variation.

The graphics are nothing to write home about, being functional but dated, and not having the kind of artistic direction that can often save indie games from losing points in this particular detail.

The interface is also a little cumbersome. You move a pillar of light on the ground, serving as a focal point for your instructions and powers, and fortunately, you can use the WASD keys to move it.

But everything else is done in a cumbersome way that requires you to activate oversized buttons, and the way the interface is designed, it seems like it was created for a tablet game.

The sound is similar, not horrible by any account, but not exactly high production value either. The music gets repetitive after a while, but there is enough in there to improve the experience and provide the world with more depth and color.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion