This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: War! Military-Themed Games + More. Additional details may be found in the original article.
Our final title today is TouchTomes’ Battle of Waterloo ($4), which takes a completely different angle from the rest of the war games here. There’s no action.
There are no explosions—well, at least not animated ones, and that’s not an entirely bad thing. Instead, Battle of Waterloo is a Choose Your Own Adventure book, providing a narrative story of the famed British battle against Napoleon on land that’s now in Belgium. You’re supposed to defeat Napoleon, and there are apparently 27 different ways to reach endings other than losing to him.
We use the word “apparently” only because this title isn’t worth playing 27 times, or for that matter, even once given how poorly it has been structured.
Five or fewer choices can lead to one of the official endings, as the story is presented through extremely lengthy narrative passages rather than real interactions on behalf of the player. They’re occasionally accompanied by art, but much of the game is spent just reading through a storyline that’s supposed to be educational, and may well inform someone who needs to be versed in the Battle, but isn’t really compelling for anyone else. One gets the sense that the story and illustrations were whipped together, a very simple forking structure was devised to move through them, and a pricetag was picked to try and see what people would pay for something so simple.
