Some players are sure to be disappointed that the resource management has been scaled down, but I felt the original Cossacks was too complicated for its own good. If not, your whole war effort is going to grind to a halt. Then there's the supply factor - for when you realise that food is running low, the only course of action is to strike out to take a local village and secure its food reserves. Even roads have strategic importance, as units rush along them far quicker than yomping over hill and dale. When advancing too, they're cohesive and avoid getting tangled up with each other.īattles are far more tactical than you might expect given the 2D perspective. Select a line formation and rather than having to drag out the direction you want your units to face, they often find the correct facing on their own. There's an impressive degree of automation too. Rather than feature 3D units and a zoomable camera perspective, what the developer has done is create a handy two-tier camera system, so you can zoom out and better appreciate your tactical situation without losing control of your units in the process. In the first game, the battles would often become unmanageable once your armies reached a certain size, as the view simply wasn't big enough for you to take stock of the situation without whizzing all over the place. Research and technological advancement are no longer important, which is unsurprising given the 20-year timeframe the game covers. The formula has been streamlined in other areas too. Wood, coal, food, iron and gold are all required to fuel your war machine, but rather than having to go through the process of erecting farms and milking cows, here most of the resource gathering is automatic, with pre-built villages that specialise in one raw material and which, if you capture them intact, will add to your constantly dwindling supplies. However, unlike Total War, Cossacks is big on resource management, though things have certainly been scaled down since the original game.
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Whereas the original game was very much a direct Age Of Empires rip-off - a kind of preemptive attempt to outdo Age Of Empires III - this time developer GSC Game World has taken equal inspiration from Total War, sidelining the linear series of campaign missions and supplanting it with a dynamic battle for Europe in which you leapfrog your army across a Risk-style map of Europe in between real-time battles for land and glory. Of course, the formula is a little more complicated than that.
You're given some land and a few peasants and the aim is to gather resources and use them to build a vast war machine with which to conquer the enemy. It requires a different tactical approach from either ancient or contemporary strategy games, yet has many of the advantages of both: high body counts, rigid formations, plenty of explosive carnage and, of course, the fact that you can rely on your gaily-clad troops not to get lost in the undergrowth.ĭespite the freshness of the setting, however, Cossacks II holds steadfast to its RTS roots. The Napoleonic era is a rich and under-utilised period for strategy gaming, one that hasn't (yet) been flogged to death through repetition and regurgitation. They were still somehow alive after all this, they then had to stand their ground and reload, a process that required more than a steady hand and could take a minute or more of your already borrowed time.Ĭossacks II, much like its predecessor, captures this antiquated style of combat remarkably well, and while the game probably isn't much fun for the thousands upon thousands of digital soldiers that fill your screen, it's a damn site more enjoyable for you, the general. Those that survived the unpleasant walk through clouds of billowing earth dredged up by cannon fire would, when in range, ready their rifles and pull the trigger in the hope it wouldn't misfire and rip their own faces off. Wearing uniforms that practically screamed, Here I am, shoot me!,Įnlisted men would conveniently arrange themselves in rows and stroll toward enemy lines. There's something Vitrinsically ridiculous about the style of armed combat that characterised the times during which Cossacks II is set.