Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars
If Napoleon had a PC, he’d probably play this.
Tags: Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars Categories: PC Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Brad on Jul 7th, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Strategy | No | ||
 |
I have a love/hate relationship with Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars. As a sequel it does quite well, making leaping advancements in both technical fields and nebulous gameplay ideals. As a representation of historical war drama it is torn between telling the story of actual events and leaving open the decisions necessary to qualify as a game. What really kills it, though, are a legion of niggling bugs that hassle you at every turn.
 |
The background is thus: the game is a simulative real-time strategy game set during the Napoleonic wars of the 19th century. This ought to bring to mind lines of European soldiers firing upon each other in straight, colorful lines. In this respect the game delivers in spades. It follows up on 2000’s Cossacks game, improving on the license with a graphical kick in the pants that might send some fans scurrying off to the local PC upgrade shop in order to run this beast. But that’s to be expected when your game boasts the capability of displaying a whopping 64,000 units on screen at the same time.
Yes, the battles are huge. To line up 120-man units along a bluff overlooking your enemy, with contingents marching in from nearby townships and mercenaries shadowed in the woods should be a Monday-morning general’s dream. As battles rage for control of Europe, it seems that every pixel on the screen needs immediate attention.
 |
 |
Herein lies the first problem of the game. So precise is the tactic, so detailed the mechanic, that the game loses its real-time nature as the player is often forced into situations where they must pause the game to re-think their strategy. I expect that there is some armchair Napoleon out there who can handle a war on six fronts, but as it stands the game’s new features often overwhelm the actual elements that made the game fun in the first place.
An example is in order: Among the new features is the quick road march. By this a unit moving in column formation (one of three selectable formations for infantry, opposing the offensive “line” and defensive “box”) will move faster on roads, marching endlessly without fatigue. That fatigue is an important limiting factor in this game, keeping your soldiers from moving too quickly for too long; so important that developer CSC Game World included an “arcade mode” in which fatigue was less of an influence on the battle’s outcome.
 |
 |
Let me be clear on this: the new formations system and the way units bind to roads to move quickly looks absolutely awesome on the surface. To see a whole phalanx of soldiers walking in perfect formation, serpentine-like, is incredible. It expedites the troop-moving process and allows the player to position forces around the map with ease, be it by clicking on the main screen or on the mini-map. It’s an elegant design of troop-moving interface.
 |
However, this innovation may be costing the game in balance. Simply put, the troops move too fast and can arrive with too little warning. The result is that you are often found to be fighting many fronts at once against a surprise stock of units that appear out of nowhere and must often break from real-time to manage the battle. This may be a matter of personal preference, but I like my RTS games to be a little more forthcoming of the threats, to offer fewer opportunities for the enemy to sneak in without warning. So ended many battles against the A.I.
 |
Also contained in that lump of questionable features is the new morale system. Soldiers that have been on an extended road march don’t tend to like their commanders much, and it shows in Cossacks II. Among the ways battles are those most commonly won by the sudden fleeing of either your troops or the enemy’s. This, while assumedly realistic, hurts the game overall by its unpredictability. A unit of riflemen that finds itself suddenly under artillery assault might break for the hills. They might have had the high ground, the experience (the number of kills a unit has seriously affects its ability to perform), and a well defended position, but with a couple of good shots from the enemy suddenly decides to disband and search for better employment. Complicating the issue is that it is very difficult, if not often impossible to regroup your panicked units. Simply put, once spooked, your guys are gone. Out of play. Kaput. This can be highly frustrating, and is also countered with the game’s “arcade mode.”
Don’t get me wrong here: I think it’s great that CSC included the arcade mode, and respect their decision to divide the play between two modes. The morale and fatigue affects it counters work as often in your favor as they do against your soldiers. I’m merely suggesting that it seems like a cheap fix to a greater problem with the gameplay that might have been solved through more balancing.
 |
That being said, there are some serious bugs in this game that do directly affect gameplay. Among these are some difficulty on getting your units to face the right way. Lining up squads of riflemen can be an exercise in frustration as, unless an enemy unit is directly in front of you to line up against, you’ll often have to fight the terrain to get that line straight. Worse is the direction of artillery. It can take so very long to get a cannon to face in the right direction that you might think one of its crew were laying dead beside it, forcing the others to push the weapon around in tight little circles. This would be horrible if it weren’t for the fact that AI facing an artillery barrage don’t always behave intelligently, and will often stand around while you pick off their ranks. On the other hand, cannons and other artillery pieces can now be captured once their crew is killed, a nice touch.
 |
Mission scripting is another shortfall. Whether a simple skirmish or a more involved campaign, it is occasionally difficult to tell whether you’re close to achieving your goal. Another example: in a mission where the goal is to wipe out the forces occupying a particular town, it is plainly visible that there are many enemy units marching around the city streets. However, they’ll never meet your guns. As you pick off the straying units outside, the mission ends suddenly. Though the city remains under their control, you’ve won. Apparently it’s not a matter of killing all the units, but the right ones. More clarity in mission briefings and sensible scripting to follow would go a long way to alleviate some of the frustration these missions can cause.
 |
Six nations vie for control of Europe: Briton, France, Russia, Prussia, Egypt, and Austria. Each of these have a unique look to their soldiers and cities, but there’s still a good rock-paper-scissors feeling going on in the combat. There’s a little better control over what sign you’ll throw at any one time based on the formations you chose, whether you hold your line for a higher defense instead of charging into the oncoming enemy, how well you use your cover, and, of course, the experience and morale of your troops, but it still boils down to one type of unit generally slaughtering another type of unit.
 |
One cool little feature is that the games don’t always end in a bloodbath. There is a greater sense of diplomacy and supply in this game, particularly when you’re talking about a new game mode in the series: the Battle for Europe. In this version, the game plays like a half Risk/half RTS version of itself. Basically, it works like this: on your turn, move your general around a map of Europe, conquering territories and building fortifications. Every turn, enlist more troops to your ranks, shore up your cities with more garrisons, or trade in the marketplaces for whatever of the six resources you’re low on. When you cross into an enemy territory, you can attack and gain that bit of land by taking it to the RTS battlefield. Win the mission, win the country, and go back to the overview map. As you take over more land, you may find yourself in a state of war with the likes of France and Napoleon. That’s no problem, though, because you can always form non-aggression pacts and treaties with other world powers and team up on him, or, if you’ve got enough clout, buy out his lands from underneath him by sabotaging his cities. Poison his wells, bomb his barracks, and encourage an insurgency until he’s got no lands to lean on. Eventually, the dwarf will surrender.
The resource system carries over into the skirmishes as well. If you’ve done a good job at capturing local townships, you should have enough wealth to out-last your enemy, even if you don’t have the strength to beat them with force. It’s possible to just wait out the battle and hope they run out of food or ammunition. They’re nice alternatives that keep players thinking about how to better get around a difficult situation. Keeping an eye on your towns is also necessary because you can garrison injured but experienced units there, drawing on new recruits from the township until you are once again at full strength, a necessary tactic.
 |
 |
Online multiplayer is a fairly straight-forward affair, basically a skirmish between two or more players with optional AI participation. The performance is good, offering perhaps the best opportunity for the game to show off its high unit-count. Really, the battles are enormous. It was kind of CSC to include a zoom-out button so you could look upon the conflicts on an even greater scale. I had no problems whatsoever setting up and finding games, a rare occurrence for me, so high marks there.
Sound and music are a grey area. Nothing in particular stands out as either strikingly good or frighteningly bad. Sound in Cossacks is just something that is there, not as immersive as you might hope, but a good snare drum and fife backdrop to the real attention getter, the play.
 |
There is what appears to be a shining example of a historical RTS here, buried under a stack of niggling little complaints, the least of which I haven’t really touched on here. It’s like death by a thousand paper cuts. Were it not for the fact that the greatest problems the game faces revolve around the crucial areas of troop movement and AI behavior, this game could easily rank in the mid 8’s. As it stands, I don’t feel comfortable recommending it to anyone but fans of the series and real Napoleonic war buffs that want to brush boots with the great generals of the times. The solid skirmish and multiplayer modes are an absolute boon, and the Battle for Europe mode is fantastic, but not enough to pull the game out of the realm of average as far as RTS’s go.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
- Great new innovations to troop movement and formation control. - Battle for Europe mode is quite entertaining. - Solid multiplayer and skirmish modes |
7.1 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Some problems getting troops to line up the way you want, attack the enemy in the way you want. - Mission modes have problems with scripting. - 101 little bugs that really mar the polish. |
|
| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Under the shrinkwrap is a scratched surface. Under that is what could have been a really good game. Needed a little more time. | |
[ Post the first comment | View related posts ]
Tags: Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars
Posted by Brad on Jul 7th, 2005 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
