Cossacks: European Wars Review

The best thing here is the game engine, which theoretically supports up to 8000 units per battle. I wasn't able to try this out, but even the first missions showed off this capability of this engine. The programmers used all their experience from Sudden Strike, which was also able to use a lot of units on a map and made an even more powerful engine. The small in size characters have been replaced by relatively big ones, so you won't have to worry that you mistakenly selected a wrong unit. No player will remain indifferent towards the multitude of rotting corpses, smoke from burning buildings, charging cavalry, naval support, and sounds of drums.

I mostly accounted for the main trumps of the game, but we shouldn't forget other aspects of it, which have also been well devised. There are a lot of buildings, they look good and are pretty big, but cannot be compared to the ones in AOK. Their names are self-explanatory, and when you destroy them, their ruins will remain on the map. You can also set fire to your own buildings, which can prove to be very useful both when retreating and in sabotage.

The unavoidable tech-tree is that big that you will rarely ever get to research all technologies in one session. All technologies are easily accessible and come with detailed explanations of all they do.

If I would just stop now, Cossacks would turn out to be one of those perfect games, but several flaws, unfortunately, hinder this. First, your computer opponents will frequently use the rushing tactics, thus simply annulling all conceptual advances this game brought. Rapid production of small, cheap kamikaze units and using them to attack fewer far more powerful units still works. I guess this kills all need for subtle tactics in the game. Even beside this, enemy AI is far from perfect and will sometimes react slowly, if at all. Another minus is the too easy procedure for capturing enemy buildings. One soldier coming close to a undefended building is all it takes. This last remark is quite subjective, though, as I gues some players will like this feature.

The graphics are precise and detailed, and as all units are in 2D, you won't need too powerful a machine to make things go smooth. The game supports all resolutions up to 2048x1536 so, if you have a screen that supports this resolution, then, well, I guess you're lucky to have a screen that can support a resolution like that.

Sound and music could not be called a masterpiece, but they are good enough to depict the period and events they should.

Multiplayer has been given full attention. Some campaigns and historical battles can only be played against live opponents over the Internet, serial cable or LAN. I did not try this, but some players complained that larger number of units can slow the multiplayer game down way too much. I am sure this can be solved in the future patches, and while you await those, you can practice your skills on the four single-player campaigns and the 26 skirmish maps.

Frankly, I liked Cossacks more than Age Of Kings, which it resembles most. Combining two RTS sub-genres was a bull's-eye. Still, the gaming population will not accept this unanimously. Some will like the increased complexity and find all they need in this game, while others might get lost in the multitude of stats, units and options and simply give the whole thing a miss. The downsides I enumerated significantly affect playability, but the rest only shows that these programmers know what they are doing and that we should take their future projects seriously.