I’ll tell you all right off the bat; this review is not going to be as pretty as some of the artwork in this game. If you play Heroes from the Past: Joan of Arc, you will almost have fun by the time you get bored and close out of the game.

I’m not trying to give you an unfairly grim forecast, but it’s just how I see it.

The game does a lot of little things right and a few big things wrong, and the balance is in something that I really want to like, but can’t quite bring myself to.

Let’s start with the good – As I said, some of the artwork is very well done. Hands down, the tiles are the some of the best I’ve ever seen. Some of the artwork looks a little muted, but it’s really not that bad.

The intro is attractive, albeit generic… pretty much everything but the town is well-done, graphically at least. The sound is a little weak, but it gets the job done, so there’s no sense complaining about it, I have bigger fish to fry with this game.

Now, the puzzles themselves: this is one of the big problems. On the plus side, you have a number of game modes to customize the game to however you like playing. All three of them are pretty interesting, I think pop or swap would be the most familiar to most people. They also have a pretty interesting mode where you draw the direction of which blocks you’d like to pop. 

You can also play all three of those modes timed or untimed, which makes the whole experience seem pretty flexible. The match game itself, however, gets tedious pretty quickly, and it leaves you wanting either more or less, depending on the moment.

In an effort, I assume, to be more innovative, the scoring on the puzzle rounds is not based on how many tiles you match up, but rather which type of tiles you match. So it doesn’t matter if you pop 100 swords if all you need are 4 logs. Other goals are to match gold squares, unfreeze blocks, break open crated tiles, and free chests and keys by dropping them to the bottom of the board. This would all seem great, but it ends up way too much to work on when you factor in another issue – the boards were all laid out by some architecture major who forgot that pretty can actually be annoying when you’re trying to accomplish something.

The boards are not set up with actually finishing them in mind. In some cases, it’s not bad, that’s just part of the challenge. In others, you find yourself shuffling over and over again, or trying to figure out a solution and getting mad at a piece of bread. Like in the last picture, bottom of the screen, left of center. That piece of bread that’s blocking the one half of the board from another. I shuffled and it came back again. I hate you, bread.  I hate you.

But I’m forgetting! This is a game where you get to build up your city and resist the evil English, right? No, this is a game where you play puzzles, then look to see if you have enough money to click the next circle, then you watch your townsfolk build it. Then, absolutely nothing changes, but I guess you feel warm inside knowing your townsfolk have cottages now.

Aside from painting Joan of Arc like she was single-handedly fighting off Sauron and his armies to save the soul of France, there’s nothing like a story here, it’s just clicking through puzzles and watching a poorly illustrated city slowly add buildings. As I said, it’s almost right, but still not. Kind of like my last relationship.  And now I’m sad…