The Return of the Heroes

Those of us who played video games through the '80s became intimate with Japanese-to-English text translations that were befuddling and often hilarious.

Two examples still present in pop culture are, 'A Winner Is You!' (Pro Wrestling for the NES, 1987) and, 'All Your Base Are Belong to Us' (Zero Wing, arcade, 1989). Terrible translations are still capable of making some of us smile, even as they cause grammar teachers to die of aneurysms.

The Return of the Heroes by cao lei is loaded with enough dodgy translation to make your inner ten-year-old cackle with nostalgia.

Unfortunately, you won't remain amused for long. The tutorial reads like someone dropped a jar of Scrabble tiles on the floor, which is problematic when you're playing a real-time strategy game.

Thankfully, The Return of the Heroes isn't an overly-complicated strategy game, so you should be able to grope your way around, Engrish or no Engrish. However, the game by itself is difficult to control, and just plain old difficult.

The Return of the Heroes stars three hero characters on a quest to free a princess. Unsurprisingly, the bad guys aren't about to let them accomplish this easily.

There are several battlefields on which the good guys and the bad guys can clash. When the heroes meet up with a monster, they swing swords or cast spells until the other guy is dead.

But battles in The Return of the Heroes are hardly small affairs. Both the heroes and the monsters are capable of summoning 'Soldiers of God', which are essentially expendable units that do the bidding of their masters. Soldiers of God are brought into being through stone idols, which are activated when a hero prays for a certain amount of time.

Soldiers of God won't work on an empty stomach, so heroes also need to pray at rice paddies scattered throughout each level. The rice is automatically harvested until the paddy is depleted. Each Soldier of God can be summoned for a certain sum of rice. Heroes can take over the enemies' rice paddies, and vice versa.

It takes a while to get the hang of The Return of the Heroes, partly because the tutorial is such a mangled mess, and partly because you'll die often enough to wonder what you're doing wrong. It doesn't matter if the enemies and their Soldiers are on an equal level to your own: the bad guys rarely fail to overwhelm you. And as soon as your heroes fall, you've had it.

The game's substandard controls don't help. You're supposed to be able to rally and control a group of soldiers at once by holding down on the touchscreen, but the move rarely works. More often than not, you drag out individual paths for your fighters, which slows things down considerably.

Worse, your Soldiers practically have no AI to speak of. Once they've defeated an enemy, they usually stand around like idiots until you go through the agony of directing them all to another target. It's irritating, it's repetitive, and it's certainly not fun.

Strategy games are not for everyone. However, there's a difference between performing poorly at a strategy game because you don't have a mind for it, and performing poorly because the game itself is shoddily done.

The Return of the Heroes is in the latter category. It's not a complete waste of time, but there are other mobile strategy titles that are more deserving of your attention.