Cossacks: European Wars (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.1 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Scott Osborne
• Reviewed on: 04/11/2001
• Updated on: 05/17/2006
• Released on: 09/13/2002
• Originally published on GameSpot: Cossacks: European Wars (PC) Review

Cossacks: European Wars is a game about epic battles in one of the most turbulent eras in European history. Mighty nation-states were forged in the fires of the battlefield, and massive fleets set sail with dreams of conquest. It was a time of war after bloody war, wars lasting decades, wars involving nearly every European nation. These dramatic events of the 16th through 18th centuries in Europe have provided Ukrainian developer GSC Game World with ample material for a fairly ambitious, if flawed, real-time strategy game.

At first glance, Cossacks looks like a real-time strategy game aimed at history majors. The details of the conflicts featured in the game, like the Thirty Years' War and the War for Austrian Succession, aren't exactly common knowledge, and units like the spakh (Turkish cavalry) and serdiuk (Ukrainian musketeer) will seem obscure to players without an encyclopedic knowledge of military history. Initially, Cossacks also looks like an Age of Empires II clone, just set a few centuries later. The similarities are many and striking. Cossacks features a very similar isometric view, visual style, unit scale, iconic interface, resource display, and map. Villagers harvest materials like wood, stone, and gold. Priests act as adjuncts to your troops, and historically based military units essentially work on a simple rock-paper-scissors combat model, in that each unit specializes in attacks on another particular type of unit.

Fortunately, there's a bit more to Cossacks than first meets the eye. You'll enjoy a lot of diversity, if nothing else. You can play as 16 different factions: Algeria, Austria, England, France, Netherlands, Piemonte, Poland, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, Saxony, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, and Venice. Each nation fields a variety of military units from four basic categories: infantry, cavalry, artillery, and navy. Each country can also pursue unique paths through 300 possible technology tree upgrades. It all might sound like a bit much, and sometimes it is, but there's a decent tutorial, as well as an extensive encyclopedia feature about the units, technology, and history featured in the game.

One of the game's most touted features is the ability to field enormous armies totaling 8,000 units--at least in theory. Games will often end with several hundred peasants toiling for you, but likely fewer military units. For example, repeated, well-executed light cavalry raids against enemy peasants and resource centers can so weaken your foe that only a hundred or so troops might be needed to march in and deliver the coup de grace.

Either way, you'll get a lot of replayability from the game. There are four campaigns, ranging from the Thirty Years' War to the battle for Ukrainian independence, though poorly integrated scripted events and an awkward attempt at injecting some role-playing into the game make these rather uninspired. You can also play ten much better single scenarios, and there's a skirmish mode that lets you confront up to six computer-controlled opponents on random maps generated according to basic criteria you set. Multiplayer mode lets you "deathmatch" on random maps or fight in historical battles from the Seven Years' War, the War of Spanish Succession, and others.

Gameplay conservatively follows a very traditional, straightforward real-time strategy formula. Your faction's town hall, apparently doubling as a maternity ward, creates peasants, who in turn erect new buildings like a barracks to produce military units or an academy to research technology upgrades. After you select a peasant and right-click on a resource center, be it for food, wood, stone, gold, iron, or coal, the villager will trot off and get to work. Fortunately, you usually don't have to hold peasants' hands and constantly issue new orders. Mines, farms, and so on require little if any maintenance and just keep cranking out vital goods when worked by your serfs. Grain fields are automatically replanted after each harvesting, for instance. The context-sensitive point-and-click interface makes controlling peasants, raising or razing buildings, and commanding troops fairly easy and intuitive. However, an order queue and easier unit selection would have been helpful.

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