Average
Tap, Tap, Tap
Heroes of Mana seems pretty straightforward during the tutorial period (the first couple of missions), but begins to annoy once you realize that the game is simply never going to get any faster than its initial plodding pace. You can rack the slider that controls the game speed, but your units will continue to meander around the battlefield as if strolling through a park instead of charging a battlefield hungry for blood. Veterans of any other RTS game will be disappointed by the slow trudge of battle, but newcomers run the risk of being soured on an entire genre because of this irritating speed issue.
To make matters worse, your army's AI is spotty at best, frequently wandering from the most direct path to an objective. They already take their sweet time getting to an objective, so the last thing you need is for them to deviate from the most efficient course available. Beyond that, once they actually arrive where you've directed them, they'll sometimes attack targets nearby the target you've selected which can be hopelessly lethal given Heroes of Mana's simplistic rock/paper/scissors unit balance.
The last problem that bothered us was the curious scarcity of resources during the early chapters of the game. Certain units (including the unit-producing structures you build within your mobile base, the Nightswan) require certain types of mana resources, so you'll need to harvest these resources from a few scattered caches on the battle map. The trouble comes from the distinct lack of any kind of surplus of resources, so if you happen to screw up and build too many of one type of unit you are completely out of luck. This is particularly paralytic in the tutorial chapters where creating too many harvesting units or attack units can result in a lack of sufficient resources to build the structures required to complete the chapters.
Silver Lined Stylus
Despite these flaws, Heroes of Mana does a few things right that held our interest long enough to enjoy some of the game's better qualities. The selection options available to you are perfectly appropriate to the dual-screen format, providing you with a wealth of ways to choose your units. Between the ability to lasso units by drawing a circle encompassing the ones you want (during which time helpfully freezes) or just tapping an icon at the bottom of the screen to select all units of a specific type, you are completely covered.
As is common with games from Square Enix, the story of Heroes of Mana (while maybe not terribly original) is surprisingly deep and emotionally engaging. While that doesn't completely make up for the tragic pacing of the game or the substandard AI, it at least provides something to motivate the long-suffering Mana fan. Suffice it to say, unless you count yourself among the devoted Mana-ites, you'll probably want to skip Heroes of Mana.
