What a mess!
While the Battleground series is a generally decent set of historical strategy games, this one is the absolute nadir of the franchise and is not worth your time. Instead, you should check out Waterloo or Gettysburg if you want to try the series and not feel like you're in wargaming hell. This one follows the template laid down by previous entries pretty closely, but manages to mess up everything that made them good and which results in a tedious and frustrating experience. As usual, this one focuses on large-scale battles in particular historical period, which this time is Napoleon's experiences in 1812 around the Russian town of Borodino. Also as usual, you'll control armies of various sizes at key points during the conflict and engage in historically accurate recreations of the famous battles, and which play out in turn-based fashion. This is quite a detailed game, so you can expect to engage in some micromanagement, and with battle requiring plenty of tactical thinking in order to win. On paper at least, this sounds like it should appeal to the hardcore historical wargamer, with its emphasis on detail and realism and for the unusual choice of period. However, in practice, this one gets almost everything wrong and really should be avoided. The main issue here is the dreadful interface, which is clunky, awkward and just plain painful to use. This means that it's very hard to actually figure what's going on or what's required of you, which isn't helped by the lack of tutorials. There's also no real campaign, while the graphics are ugly, so when you throw all this together, you're left with a big mess that is best left on the shelf.
