Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Battle

Waterloo is a real-time strategy game put of by BreakAway Games, Ltd. It provides several historical battles between the dying French Empire and Great Britain and the Allies. It also gives a five or six-part tutorial to help the novice better adapt him or herself to the game. These tutorials begin by showing you how to utilize the artillery and end with a building-to-building war simulation.

I found the graphics to be pretty decent, and as with many games, you can zoom in and out considerably. As soon as I figure out how to make screen shots, I’ll provide some each of these game reviews. I can make no comment on sound as my sound card has joined the choir invisible and money’s tight around here.

As for the game itself, I found it to be difficult to control the course of battle, after all you’re fighting usually on a multi-front with many armies and the maps are what we like to call “frickin’ huge.” One map might be around 20-30 miles (that’s scaled down miles) and your troops move (even when on a forced march) slow enough to give you reason to concentrate elsewhere while they go forth, but fast enough to get into trouble while you’re busy fighting the French over yonder. And as I mentioned before, this is a real-time game. Unlike a turn-based game, the fight continues even though you are no longer concentrating on a certain area of the game. This, in and of itself does do well to lend to the quality of challenging oneself.

My grievance with it is the profound de-emphasize of the use of artillery. The greatest emphasis is on the cavalry, which can attack from one portion of the screen to the other. Artillery, on the other hand, is more like background noise with this game, fairly ironic, since Napoleon himself was an artilleryman.

On the whole, the game can be entertaining, and cost is not prohibitive ($3.24). For the ratings, I give it 5 1/2 dead Frenchmen.