Peninsular War Battles Reviews

Easy to learn to play and familiar to wargamers. Not particularly sophisticated but good entertainment

Cavalry are halted on moving adjacent to a unit that retreats so melee cannot occur. This is daft: if an infantry unit runs away from cavalry the latter should either be able to pursue it or continue and use its remaining movement points. Granted, this game is a highly abstracted representation of Napoleonic warfare, but it should still adhere to a degree of 'realistic' behaviour by the troop types. It's a shame 'cos otherwise the game, though limited in scope, could be enjoyable.

I like the game. simple but have to use tactics to win. but it needs a patch. infantry form squares when attacked by other infantry. no, they should only form squares to repel cavalry. also, it crashes quite often and hesitates even on my powerful rig. needs fixing. but very cool Napoleonics.

Tried to play a couple of scenarios but CTD every time. How can they release something in this untested condition? May come back to it later if they ever get round to fixing it and testing it properly.

Excellent graphics and audio, progressively more difficult battle scenarios requiring you to change tactics and respond to changing situations. A definite must for any one who, like me, grew up on table top war games with hundreds of carefully painted minature Napleonic figures and dice!

Another user that suffered a CTD after about turn 2 on all the games I played. Thankfully I bought this on Steam and not the developers website so I could get a refund. If the devs can fix the CTD isssue then I may re-purchae, as the game looks good, has a nice range of scenarios,and the AI (from what little I saw of it) may not be too dumb. But game is currently unplayable

Covers the Peninsular War campaign of Wellington. Timewise, this happened around the same time as the Russian campaign of Napoleon. Gameplay is as most HexWars games. Decent array of scenarios. If you are comfortable with HexWars style, recommended.

Great Game! Difficult enough to be challenging , simple enough to be enjoyable. If you are interested in the Napoleonic Wars , are familiar with strategy and tactics , you will probably wish for Hexwar Games to cover this period as well as their excellent Civil War and Tank Battle series. The soundtracks are riveting , promoting just one more battle, but could be improved by more varied period pieces. Thank You for producing these games!

This can best be described as Napoleonics lite. The designers paid very little attention to building the behavior of different kinds of units and formations into the game, but lavished attention on glitzy graphics and animated sprites. Being a graphics modder I have nothing against glitzy graphics, but the core functions of the game shouldn't suffer at their expense. This game feels like it was meant to be played on a tablet, and the designers decided to toss out any aspect of reality that wasn't tablet friendly. Unfortunately, by its nature, Napoleonic warfare isn't tablet friendly, and if you make it look like it is what you've made is a tablet game dressed up in Napoleonic costume. Several of the formations (notably the square) are currently exhibiting some odd behavior, but I'm sure (or at least I would hope) that the developers will squash these bugs after a few patches. But the designers seem to be unaware (or don't care) that a Napoleonic battalion in column formation was essentially incapable of marching down a road or crossing a bridge because each company in the battalion was actually in line formation (a hundred or so yards across), with the four to six companies of the battalion stacked one behind the other (which means that French columns tended to be a hundred yards wide and twelve to eighteen men deep -- not really what we normally think of as a column). I played this game for half an hour before it became clear that this was a no go. You might learn something about the war in the Peninsula from playing this, but as far as Napoleonic warfare goes, it's a waste of time. For all their faults, JTS Software produces much better Napoleonic titles (including one on the Peninsular War).

Single-player tactical Napoleonic Wars game using a turn-based hexgrid system with a scale of about 150 yards per hex and about 15-20 minutes per turn, though we aren't told the actual scale. Units are battalion/regiment sized, with about 100 men per unit of strength for infantry/cavalry and one cannon per unit strength for artillery. You command leaders, skirmishers, line infantry, cavalry (dragoons can dismount), and artillery, engaging in ranged combat and/or melee, with different morale ratings to represent the difference between, e.g., the French Imperial Guard and the Spanish Militia, etc. Terrain includes slopes, rocks, woodland, streams, roads, bridges, buildings, control points, etc. The game system is pretty much the same as with HexWar's Civil War series of games, allowing you to control infantry formations (line, column, square, unformed). Since it's the Iberian Peninsular War (Portugal and Spain), the battles are small, with some battles broken up into multiple scenarios. You can play either France or the Allies, with a series of campaigns providing dozens of scenarios and dozens of hours of play with multiple save game options. Three AI difficulty levels, which vary how good the computer opponent is, not the unit strengths, plus an "historical" mode which is supposed to represent weapons efficacy more realistically. Still there are some play balance issues, for example the "Somosierra" scenario, which I find impossible to win playing as French no matter which settings I use. Since you are supposed to win each scenario in sequence, this means I can't complete the French campaign unless I use the "cheat" of unlocking all the scenarios, which I'd rather not do. But I play on an Apple PowerBook running macOS, so my historical military game options are strictly limited, and I'm thankful just to have this game available, even if it's not as good as other games for Windows computers.