My previous history with the Cossacks series, and indeed the American Conquest series, has been mixed. It has managed to be, at times, utterly compulsive, and yet at the same time genuinely infuriating to the point of DVD cases accidentally being cracked. This RTS series ventures into an area that is not necessarily well known for being explored by mainstream games, that love either ye Medieval times or anything post-1939, and that is the period roughly straddling the gunpowder age. However, recurrent problems with this series include cripplingly dodgy AI, an oftentimes casual attitude towards balancing units, and resolutely maintaining a love of 2D rendered textures, unlike its more recently released cousin AoE3 which changed to a fully 3D engine.
Having been hyped for a very long time, Cossacks II was a game I actively sought out, as opposed to the majority of games I buy which I tend to just randomly pick up, like someone with too much time on their hands in a sweet shop (candy store to the Yanks). Whilst taxing on (at the time) powerful PCs, there were no unforseen mishaps during installation, which is something that could do with being more common when it comes to 'epic' scale RTS games... But, after that point it all went downhill.
1) What the HELL happened to the map editor feature? It was by far the BEST part of the previous games! It provided endless hours of entertainment making pitched battles between 1000 howitzers and 3000 Spanish Pikemen, and as soon as I saw it was absent, I realised much of the game's fun went with it.
2) Who decided to give the British people in the training mission bloody American accents! It breaks all sense of immersion within the period completely, as though one of the characters started talking about Head and Shoulders vs Pantene Pro-V. It instantly got me irritable, being British myself, but also being a bit of a history geek.
3) This game has the largest unit count of the series, at 128,000 I believe, and yet there is no way on earth to get your troops to automatically attack, especially important when it comes to bloody muskets. When this is in a recreation of, say, the battle of Waterloo, with hundreds of units involved, did they intend one to be moving at lightning speed frantically attempting to press the 'Fire' button for every single unit? The only actual solution is to pause the game copiously finding units in range and telling them to fire, which breaks the pace of the action somewhat...
4) The music is abysmal. It makes a vague attempt to be period-related, but paradoxically the earlier games did a much better job of it, and in Cossacks II it drives me up the bloody wall with the way it constantly repeats itself like someone stuck the iPod on loop by accident.
Okay that's a few rants I needed to get off my chest.
More analytically, the gameplay is simply dreadful. Especially with the aforementioned lack of auto-fire, the game asks one to micromanage constantly, and this is a game designed for a huge scale; where's the logic? The controls seem suited to control, at best, 3 units, and most efficiently one. How in a large scale battle is a player going to be paying enough attention to ONE unit to get it to fire with individual sets of ranks rather than a single massed volley? Truly atrocious design. Also, the morale system can really bugger off, since effectively it consists of 'not walking on roads=bad' and 'having lots of men killed at once is bad'.
Not only is the gameplay bad, but GSC failed to realise what made their older games charming. It was quite nice to be able to pick from lots of different nations, even if not all of them had huge differences, and it was also nice to have lots of different units, even if some of them became more than a little overpowered (see cannons in American Conquest). The loss of the map editor function adds to this, along with the fact that maps cannot be randomly generated, and are always limited in size to a fraction of what they were before, and with a lot less variation.
There are no more overpowered UBER units, but this is balanced by the fact that combat is won by the person able to pay enough attention to get their units to actually fire their weapons. The AI problems are as present as ever, and the cheating nature of said AI is even more apparent when they seem able to manage everything as though it were a functioning RTS, and seem perfectly capable of getting multiple units to fire. It's so teeth-gnashingly frustrating to have the AI carrying on like everyone playing the bloody thing should be finding it just as easy.
About the only thing I liked about this game were the smoke effects, and the graphics in general were admittedly quite impressive, but what game's graphics aren't, even when this was released in April 2005? Not only was the game by itself a particularly poor RTS, it compared poorly to its now semi-ancient ancestors, for which the company deserves being shot out of a mortar; how is it any company cannot reasonably observe what makes a game fun? Maybe the American accent was meant as a deliberate warning to stay away, and that from this point on the game will be unbelievably awful. I wish I had listened...
Having been hyped for a very long time, Cossacks II was a game I actively sought out, as opposed to the majority of games I buy which I tend to just randomly pick up, like someone with too much time on their hands in a sweet shop (candy store to the Yanks). Whilst taxing on (at the time) powerful PCs, there were no unforseen mishaps during installation, which is something that could do with being more common when it comes to 'epic' scale RTS games... But, after that point it all went downhill.
1) What the HELL happened to the map editor feature? It was by far the BEST part of the previous games! It provided endless hours of entertainment making pitched battles between 1000 howitzers and 3000 Spanish Pikemen, and as soon as I saw it was absent, I realised much of the game's fun went with it.
2) Who decided to give the British people in the training mission bloody American accents! It breaks all sense of immersion within the period completely, as though one of the characters started talking about Head and Shoulders vs Pantene Pro-V. It instantly got me irritable, being British myself, but also being a bit of a history geek.
3) This game has the largest unit count of the series, at 128,000 I believe, and yet there is no way on earth to get your troops to automatically attack, especially important when it comes to bloody muskets. When this is in a recreation of, say, the battle of Waterloo, with hundreds of units involved, did they intend one to be moving at lightning speed frantically attempting to press the 'Fire' button for every single unit? The only actual solution is to pause the game copiously finding units in range and telling them to fire, which breaks the pace of the action somewhat...
4) The music is abysmal. It makes a vague attempt to be period-related, but paradoxically the earlier games did a much better job of it, and in Cossacks II it drives me up the bloody wall with the way it constantly repeats itself like someone stuck the iPod on loop by accident.
Okay that's a few rants I needed to get off my chest.
More analytically, the gameplay is simply dreadful. Especially with the aforementioned lack of auto-fire, the game asks one to micromanage constantly, and this is a game designed for a huge scale; where's the logic? The controls seem suited to control, at best, 3 units, and most efficiently one. How in a large scale battle is a player going to be paying enough attention to ONE unit to get it to fire with individual sets of ranks rather than a single massed volley? Truly atrocious design. Also, the morale system can really bugger off, since effectively it consists of 'not walking on roads=bad' and 'having lots of men killed at once is bad'.
Not only is the gameplay bad, but GSC failed to realise what made their older games charming. It was quite nice to be able to pick from lots of different nations, even if not all of them had huge differences, and it was also nice to have lots of different units, even if some of them became more than a little overpowered (see cannons in American Conquest). The loss of the map editor function adds to this, along with the fact that maps cannot be randomly generated, and are always limited in size to a fraction of what they were before, and with a lot less variation.
There are no more overpowered UBER units, but this is balanced by the fact that combat is won by the person able to pay enough attention to get their units to actually fire their weapons. The AI problems are as present as ever, and the cheating nature of said AI is even more apparent when they seem able to manage everything as though it were a functioning RTS, and seem perfectly capable of getting multiple units to fire. It's so teeth-gnashingly frustrating to have the AI carrying on like everyone playing the bloody thing should be finding it just as easy.
About the only thing I liked about this game were the smoke effects, and the graphics in general were admittedly quite impressive, but what game's graphics aren't, even when this was released in April 2005? Not only was the game by itself a particularly poor RTS, it compared poorly to its now semi-ancient ancestors, for which the company deserves being shot out of a mortar; how is it any company cannot reasonably observe what makes a game fun? Maybe the American accent was meant as a deliberate warning to stay away, and that from this point on the game will be unbelievably awful. I wish I had listened...
