The conversion of the tabletop miniature game Mage Knight to a turn-based strategy game seems like a no-brainer on the surface. And, for the most part, Mage Knight: Destiny’s Soldier does a admirable job of translating the tabletop rules into a video game. While it has some neat design ideas, they are mired by sloppy interface and a bland presentation.

If anything, Mage Knight: Destiny’s Soldier looks good. Characters are big, colorful and indicative of the game’s roots. In particular, I liked the game’s art style. Your starting army isn’t all that much to look at, though as you progress, you’ll discover a wide variety of unique characters. Still, much of the game’s visual presentation looks like it would be more at home on the GBA rather than the DS.

Sound, on the other hand, is terrible. The same song plays almost non-stop throughout the game. There are a few times where the music actually changes, but even here it sounds suspiciously like every other song on the limited soundtrack.

If you are at all familiar with tabletop games, Mage Knight shouldn’t pose much of a challenge. For the rest of us, it will take a while – and that’s before you even begin to actually play the game.

Every battle begins with a build total, or a set number of resource points that is used to determine the makeup of your army. Each soldier has a point value which, when combined with the values of your other soldiers, will equal the point value. In other words, if your build total is 100, you can choose to fill your ranks with 10 soldiers worth 10 points a piece or two soldiers worth 50 points each.

Building armies is one of Mage Knight’s strengths and opens up a world of possibilities. At the start of the game, you select one hero who serves as the anchor for the rest of your army. From there, you are given a small starting selection of soldiers to choose from, each with their own abilities and weaknesses. As you progress through the story, new types are introduced, allowing you to build more powerful armies (provided, of course, that you have enough cash to hire them). The key to the whole system is that the more powerful a soldier is the higher his point value – so it is impossible to field a massive army composed of high-level soldiers. Instead, you’ll have to think about the composition of your army.

The actual game is where Mage Knight begins to fall apart. You begin the game by selecting one of five hero classes. This is done with little explanation about who or what you are choosing. Rather than an easy to understand explanation, you are given a series of numbers that, to a new player, mean about as much as a copy of yesterday’s Tokyo Stock Exchange numbers. You are then thrown into a text-heavy story that basically boils down to your character becoming involved in a war simply because he is the “chosen one”. From here, you move from region to region recruiting soldiers and taking part in a series of long battles.

Given the game’s roots, the lack of multiplayer options is a letdown. Even a simple “pass the DS” mode would have been something. There’s also no skirmish mode, nor is there a way to replay past battles.

Success in Mage Knight is largely determined by how quickly you pick up the game’s rules. Mage Knight includes a quick-reference guide that is accessible with a touch of a button. Doing so brings up question marks that, when touched with the stylus, bring up the relevant information. Having the rules right there is a great idea and will help ease newcomers into the game.

Still, even with this quick reference guide, Mage Knight can be confusing. An in-game tutorial is included, though it stops short of actually being useful. I actually had to look up information on the Internet in order to get better explanations of most of the game mechanics.

It also doesn’t help that the difficulty rockets up from easy to hard quickly. The A.I. isn’t all that special, though you are often faced with larger numbers.

It is clear that the developers were trying to keep Mage Knight: Destiny's Soldier as true to the tabletop game as possible, though the end result is a cumbersome mess. All movement and battle controls are handled with the touch screen. After selecting a soldier, you can draw a line indicating his movement. Soldiers have a limited move radius, though they can be pushed further (indicated by a red line) at a cost of health. Once a character has been moved, you can then rotate him to face the nearest enemy or objective. This works, except for when you’re in a group of characters – then it can be very difficult to select the right soldier.

The main problem with the interface is that the touch screen’s response is terrible, so you’ll often have to tap on a character more than once to get it to register. And, when you do finally get a response, you are sometimes so frustrated that you’ll end up making a silly move.

As games go, Mage Knight: Destiny’s Soldier is pretty bad and hard to recommend, but at the same time it is the type of game I would like to see more of on the DS. There’s no reason it can’t work on the DS; it simply needs to be adapted to fit the audience better.