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Looks can be deceiving

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 26
Date: April 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

When I read on the box that it was thoroughly researched, I thought, "Hmmm, a serious Napoleonic game for a change". Boy, was I mislead. It certainly looks Napoleonic at the beginning of a scenario. It sounds Napoleonic -great music. That is where it ends. Combat barely resembles Napoleonic combat. Cavalry units ought to be called Panzers they are so dominating and artillery is largely ineffective. The larger scenarios are unplayable due to the RT quality of the game. -Too much going on to keep track of -which leads to all sorts of unhistorical results. Leaders are virtually invulnerable to any bad effect -even when surrounded and being walk over by the enemy. I was just glad to get $20 of my money back when I sold the game to a kid down the street. If you are a serious Napoleonic buff, I don't recommend this game. If you want some (graphically mediocre) eye candy for a few hours, then this is the ticket for you.

Big disapointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 6
Date: February 27, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game was a huge disapointment. I expected this game to be like Sid Myer's Gettysburg, which,by the way is an excelent game, but it wasn't. The graphics were horrible and the animation was very choppy. I liked the game for 1 hour then I wanted my money back. Take my advice, DON'T BUY THIS GAME !

Waterloo:Graphics worst battle

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 11
Date: March 18, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I was very disappointed about this game. The graphic were the worst I have ever seen. I have all of the Sid Meiers games and love them all. That is why I don't understand how these graphics ended up so bad. Having to try that hard to make out what a unit is on screen is just terrible!

Table wargamers take heed!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 9
Date: January 21, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game is not for you!

The play is extremely clunky and the unit graphics are horribly done. It would seem the designers have placed too much emphasis on cavalry as they are way overpowered and the artillery appears to be shooting BBs and may as well not even be on the battlefield. The objective points are never clear as to where the true ground is, so you may hold a solid line for hours but lose the points because your men just weren't on the right pixel.

The AI often jumbles into a solid block of mess with which the inferior graphics engine really tortures, so that you never know what the hell is yards in front of you. Even more fascinating is that the AI somehow fires volleys from this massive mess into your well formed line shattering them for some reason. You suffer incohesion but the AI can just munge corps together and even fire through them.

All in all a very disappointing game not even near some of the better quality games of Strategy First. I think I will skip the next one in this awful series - Austerlitz, and SF needs to give Breakaway Games a break away.

...?where's the graphics!?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 16
Date: April 20, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Frankly, I don't know you, so what do I care if you waste yourmoney on this B-class game. I'm just writing this because I wasmislead (and therefore am upset) by the PRICE of this ... game. It is often the case that you get what you pay for. So if you buy a game for $15.00, you shouldn't expect a masterpiece, however, this game advertises with a ... price tag and somewhat good reviews which is usually enough to expect good game-play and well defined graphics. Well, think again. The price tag on this game should read ... (at the most). I mean think about it, how on earth can this game sell for ... when for ten $$ more you can get a spectacular game like "Age of Empires?" But, if you really insist on wasting your money, like I said, what do I care?

Bore terloo!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 27
Date: September 03, 2002
Author: Amazon User

What a waste of money! If you are thinking of getting this game then wait until the price drops to about a quarter or what it is because that's all it's worth!
The good points are: There is a flashy title page with a nice little tune. There is a really nice historical account of the battle (although the writer does need to learn a little more grammar!)
Well, that's it. There are the good points! Now for the bad points...
The training scenarios are incredibly irritating. Every move you make it stopped by the "trainer" while a banner appears with information about how to move units etc. and the game automatically pauses which you have to undo manually each and every time. What a pain! In addition, at the end of each instruction you read you are told that to exit the game press the escape key. I wish it told me what to do to get my hard-earned money back!!
When you have mastered the training with lots of swearing at the computer and the notion that you have paid 40 bucks for the game so why not see it through, you get onto the battle action. What a joke! There are, I am told, 60 different uniforms in the programme. Pity we can't actually see them!
I tried to dowload screenshots from a site on the net but each time I couldn't get to see them for some technical reason. Hardly surprising having seen the game! "Is this IT?", I though when I first saw it. Terrible!
Gameplay is no fun either. I give commands only to@see that the unit hsn't moved, and if you want to move several units, sometimes you cannot find the brigade commander the units belong to.
Do I even need to mention the jumpy scrolling?
Maybe a real aficionado of the old table wargames who has never seen a computer game before might get excited over this, but for the rest of you I would recommend you to stay well clear of this.

Worst Sid Meier game EVER!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 18
Date: June 17, 2001
Author: Amazon User

When I bought this game, I expected it to be basically Gettysburg, but with more pomp of the Napoleonic era. Unfortunately, it took the bad parts of Gettysburg, and blended it into new bad parts. First, the enemy calvary is next to invincible. I just finished playing a game, and was stunned to see one British calvary unit going down my line, crushing all my units. By the time the calvary unit was done, I had a total of one unit left! The game seems to think I'm able to put my whole army in square formation ALL the time, yet still attack. There is ALWAYS calvary attacking me, and I can't always have my men in squares. Second, they took this from Gettysburg: Why do enemy units that are broken run through my lines, into the rear, and regroup? They ALWAYS do this. In Gettysburg, when even easy scenarios lasted a decent amount of time (unlike Waterloo), I found myself taking units out of the line and chasing these rogue units away from my Victory Points. Third, why are there Victory Points? Couldn't the computer just figure at the end of the battle which side has the best position and things like that? Why must I keep units from the line to guard these precious areas from roaming calvary (tanks, for the most part) and rogue units? Fourth, and final:Attacking at all seems futile. Even when I do all I can, like reserve a unit or two to continue firing on the enemy while I get other units in attack column and charge, most attacks fail miserably. I'm not sure if this problem is just due to a crappy game or if attacking back then was really so futile. In Gettysburg, I could attack, and attack often, and I liked that. I could trust my Yanks or Johnny Rebs to take the enemy position, but these French, Brits, and Prussians I don't trust one little bit. I'll stick to Gettysburg and Antietam.

My first bad review...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: March 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I was in love with gettysburg and antietam, and waterloo came out and eagerly baought it.

The game is very good but there are several problems with it that are so big, I have to badly rate the game.

The first is cavalry iss WAY too powerful. i know at the time cavalry was powerful but a group 80 cavalrymen making a brigade go into square automaticly over and over again whilst you click line is no way accurate. its just annoying.

When you have infantry in line and 80 cavalry men make you 2000 man brigade go into square and then while you away tending to another part of the battle and you return to see enemy infantry has torn apart your infantry stuk in square, its very annoying.

The second is, sometimes infantry just dosnt fire. Your regiment just stands there, aiming the gun at the enemy but not firing or reloading while the enemy is firing at you. So, if you send a regiment behind to enemy to flank them, it wont fire and you lose. Wether this is a bug or not I dont know, it certainly wasnt in gettysburg.

There is a sequal and maybe that is different but for some reason, its not being published. but, those two above reasons are reason enough for me to not play this game again and to give it 2 stars, as it could be a great game without those 2 fundamental flaws.

Nicely done, but lacks replayability.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 16 / 16
Date: March 04, 2002
Author: Amazon User

"Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Battle" (WNLB) is the third game to use Sid Meier's "Gettysburg" engine- the most successful PC wargame of all-time. Of course, any game using a 1997 game as its base is not really going to blow anyone in 2002 away with its graphics, sound, or interface. To put it bluntly WNLB looks very dated, especially the terrain graphics. The game does contain wonderfully researched and accurate uniforms of the numerous units involved in this epic battle. No plain blue and gray here, instead we get the huge spectrum of colors that made up the uniforms of Napoleonic armies. In fact, the entire game's attention to historical detail is very admirable.

But to an experienced wargamer eye-candy will always be secondary to gameplay, and it is here where WNLB shines. Sid Meier's engine has been excellently updated to demonstrate the complexities of the Napoleonic battlefield with its "rock, scissors, paper" battle between infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Cavalry is the instrament of decision, and careful use of your mounted resources is the key to victory or defeat. The AI is also very good, and in some scenarios it will crush the human player. This is real time action, so it requires a quick hand and eye, and judicial use of the clock and pause key if the action gets too chaotic. A realtime engine works wonderfully for small to medium sized scenarios, and really introduces the player to the chaos of 19th century combat. However, this engine is far less successful in the larger scenarios- the player will have very difficult time keeping track of all his units without playing at the slowest speed and using the pause button every 10 seconds or so.

WNLB suffers from a lack of replayability that hurts all war games based just on a single battle. There are only so many times one will want to keep refighting the battle of Waterloo. The game does come with numerous scenarios to help replayability. However, alot of these scenarios are large sized, and are quite unplayable due to the engine's limitations. Due to its lack of replayability and dated graphics, I can't really recommend WNLB to anyone other than die-hard wargamers and Napoleonics buffs.

Your mileage may vary.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 15 / 19
Date: July 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

By the review title, how much you will enjoy Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Battle (WNLB) depends on what you expect of it. In the tactical scale (the interaction of the combat battalions, or "units"), Breakaway has certainly done a commendable job of evolving the SMG game engine to cover Napoleonic-era tactics. Cavalry has greater variety in its light & heavy classes, and infantry formations are expanded to include different column & line formation options (dependent on the unit's nationality), including the ability to "square" against cavalry attacks. Small-arms variations allow special light troops' rifles along with standard smoothbore muskets, with notable differences in firing range. Even so, the relative short range of small arms (compared to Amer. Civil War weapons) in WNLB allows that close "shock action" melees can be more common, and therefore Breakaway has added the feature of unit "cohesion" beyond the "stress" factor of SMG; when a unit loses cohesion through various movement & combat actions, it loses the ability to engage & stand in melees. A significant improvement in patch version v1.002 is that artillery crews can hide in infantry squares when cavalry threatens to attack, and that cavalry is pared down overall in its earlier potency. By & large, in the tactical realm, WNLB captures the differing traits of the opposing armies quite well, giving the feel of a live-action miniatures wargame with 15mm figures. (This is further enhanced by the excellent graphical detail applied to specific unit types, being much better than in the earlier SM games.) "Army morale" has also been added to accent the effect of one side taking greater losses over the other; reduced army morale translates into surviving units accumulating stress much quicker, and provides victory points to the opposing side. The game's AI also gives a creditable job in its ability both to attack and defend, and applies unit fire so to "gang up" on certain units and stress them out very quickly. In spite of all this, WNLB has a central failure---the ability to play larger battles (corps-level & above) in a plausible way. And Napoleonic battles are more compelling when played in the grand-tactical scale. Historical "command & control" abilities of the various leaders are minimal in application (as it was with the earlier SM battle games), with control being defined more by a gamer's arcade-style mousesport. Unit movement animation is very choppy & irritating in the original version of WNLB, although patch version v1.002 helps rectify this. Map scroll is also frustratingly slow, further challenging the ability to play larger battles except at larger zoom levels, but then unit control becomes harder in turn. The game is therefore is its best when playing division-level tactical exercises in less expansive areas. The shallow command-and-control treatment perpetuated in WNLB, however, combined with the continous-time game clocking (instead of the much better "we-go" resolution shown in last year's Combat Mission game), gives an unsatisfactory treatment if attempting the full battle on grand tactical level. Multiplay hasn't been attempted yet by this reviewer, but problems with synchronization in the original game have been reported at Breakaway's game forums, although again patch v1.002 (and a later patch) are to rectify this also....

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