Cossacks: European Wars

The Good
This game is Age of Empires through and through. Therefore any veteran of that game will instinctively know how to play it before they’ve even got it out the box. This isn’t bad by definition (see Bad section) as it is a very solid and popular system.

Finally buildings seem to be correctly proportioned to soldiers, and as a nice touch stone buildings can no longer be knocked down with fists and swords. Much besieging involves slaying the town’s occupants and capturing the buildings, which makes a welcome change.

Of course the main selling point of this game is that it is Age of Empires… but bigger! Much MUCH bigger in fact. Although the game quotes thousands of units you’re more likely to field several hundred, but the sight is still one for sore eyes.

The ship design and animations are simply gorgeous, and the water isn’t bad either- although the shorelines tend to be a bit too rounded for my eyes.

I really like the little painting of cossacks on the front of the box, but it's not an original for the game. So poo.

That’s actually all I can say.

The Bad
Allow me to overuse food as a metaphor for this game. I absolutely adore rib-eye steak, yet I’m pretty indifferent to cornflakes. If someone were to offer me a single perfectly made steak I’d be enthralled. If someone were to offer me a kitchen full of cornflakes I’d be less than amused. It’d be unwieldy and impractical, particularly as cornflakes are designed to be eaten in a small quantity anyway.

What am I trying to explain? This game is literally Age of Empires with an artificially boosted unit count, and it just doesn’t work. You have the ability to group your throng of men into proper units, which is actually the only way they’re at all effective. Yet (and I’m not sure if this was just me) I could never group units into the large squads I’m presented with in the scenarios. Also units seem to decay over time, simply becoming a mass of men for you to reorganise. Which was pernickety to begin with. Also I never figured out how to organise cavalry into squads, again making them useless.

Oh and how do you train those hundreds and hundreds of men? You click. Forever. This is made even worse as you have to train a specific number in order to make a squad. The sequel introduced a training toggle (e.g. click to train units indefinitely) but why not simply have you train whole squads at a time? You often find yourself with a ton of superfluous men standing around waiting for three more to enlist and allow them to make a whole team.

This aspect is amplified by the presence of mercenaries, who you often find yourself relying on as they’re dirt-cheap and train almost instantly, whilst proper units (particularly cavalry) take frikkin decades to appear. But they’re completely useless. I’d amassed a hoard of mercenary cavalry that literally filled the screen. I sent them off careening towards the enemy, synchronised sabres flailing. And they all died almost instantly. Rubbish. Grenadiers can be hired there as well, but I never could get them to use anything but bayonets. Bayoniers maybe?

This “bigger is better” ideology is applied to the research tree as well. Now I appreciate that the time period was one of great technological achievements and progress, but that isn’t what you’re doing here. You pick from a stupendously vast list of researches, each of which improve something in an unnoticeably tiny way. It’s not clear if any of them have any affect on the game, but you just learn them anyway. Why not have the age advancements cover all of these improvements?

By far and away the most glaring problem with cloning Age of Empires is that the game’s setting simply doesn’t fit. Every battle you turn up with a bunch of peasants and build a small town in order to raise an army and defeat the other nearby recently raised town. But the wars of the time were fought between established towns and countries. No army in the English Civil War built an entire new town before attacking! Even Age of Empires III corrects this with its colonial setting, the previous two being set in times of settlement and expansion.

Cossacks seems to use the same A.I as Age as well, especially evident in skirmishes. The enemy has a habit of sending this constant stream of weak soldiers at you. It really loves its gangs of Mortars, which are hilarious as they literally fall apart or are captured if an opposing unit comes anywhere near them.

Something I’ve become attached to following the swish and sparkly games we have nowadays are pixels. The pixelated characters of Age of Empires, and particularly Red Alert 2, lend them this gritty, rough-edged look that’s hard to achieve with 3D graphics (check out Command and Conquer Generals).

However Cossacks has this horrible plastic look to it. Units look like mannequins and move like Autons. Battle animations are hilarious, pikemen look like they're raking the lawn. Worst of all the scenery is this flat monotonous green, undulating and yet homogenised like the never-ending football pitch of Naboo. Indeed the whole environment looks like a Subbuteo mat.

The game even fails technically. You needn’t worry that your huge army fills up the entire screen, thus rendering it a pain in the proverbials to select. As soon as they come up to an obstacle, or particularly when they engage the enemy, the whole lot condenses into a single model. I’m not sure if there’s a technical term for this but every unit has an insubstantial quality to them. Make a hole big enough for one man to fit and a whole army can squeeze through like an octopus. The grand sweep of military formations splodges into one lamely animated soldier. Arg!

Also I have yet to find any evidence that archers of the time period dressed as clowns, or were even used at all for that matter.


The Bottom Line
This is an ugly lame duck of a game that has a bizarre cult following, possibly owing to the uniqueness of the setting. I honestly have nothing to recommend about it. Actually I would rather eat an entire room full of cornflakes- or maybe just play Age of Empires.