Darwinianevolution

User Score
7.5

Presentation - 8.0
Gameplay - 8.0
Value - 6.0

The RTS genre is one of those kinds of games that blends itself with many different settings. Out of all of them, however, historic settings are the most popular one, due to having a massive amount of variety in every aspect of the setting, and also being recognizable by the public. After Age of Empires II became the staple of RTS and historical games in 1999, we’ve seen many contenders trying to top it, with little to no results, even by the Age of Empires series itself. It has, however, brought to the limelight a ton of deviations and innovations from the standard set up in 1999. This is where Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars and Battle for Europe comes in.

The Cossacks series began in the early 2000s, and has always received mixed reviews from most outlets. There have been three major releases, the original in 2000, Cossacks II in 2005 and Cossacks III (a remake of the original) in 2016. In particular, I’d like to talk about the second game in the series, due to it being the most unique of them, with many features and elements not present in the other two. Out of that game, there are two fully fledged versions, the original Napoleonic Wars and an updated rerelease that came out a year, Battle for Europe, which is the game I’ll be focusing on in this review, although both BfE and NW share many elements, so this review will work for both titles unless I specifically mention the differences.

Before starting this, a bit of warning. Cossacks II Battle for Europe is a stand-alone expansion, so you don’t need to buy Napoleonic Wars to play it. The few things exclusive to the original release (basically just a very poorly written campaign mode) aren’t worth the full price of the game. And on that note, both the Steam release of Cossacks II Battle for Europe and Napoleonic Wars are very poorly optimized for modern PCs. BfE crashes frequently on W8 and W8.1, and according to many reviews on Steam, it straight up doesn’t work on W10. I understand these two aren’t the most popular and profitable games, especially when trying to push your new game Cossacks 3, but if you’re going to rerelease it, you better make sure they function properly. The GOG release isn’t that much better, although I’ve heard it fares somewhat better. The multiplayer is dead, depending on the old servers and connection methods of a decade ago, which doesn’t make things better.

Cossacks II Battle for Europe is an RTS developed by GSC Game World, based around the Napoleonic Wars of early XIXth century. In skirmish mode you have to organize and manage your base to keep your economy afloat and to create armies to defeat and conquer your enemy, whereas in battle mode, you have at your disposal massive armies to fight. The game mechanics are simple, yet very different from your standard RTS, but there is no base management. These two modes vary throughout the game, adding different twists and turns depending on the game mode. In single player, you have three options to play: Campaign mode, Battle for Europe mode and Skirmish mode. Campaign is self-explanatory, four campaigns with four-five missions each, plus one tutorial. They are based on battles from the Napoleonic wars, although sometimes they go into the what-if territory (for example, you can win Waterloo as the French in their campaign). They are pretty good missions overall, but the need to get very specific objectives with very limited troops will sometimes make you mad. Skirmish is your typical single player mode, with already generated maps to choose from, and they also include battle scenarios already prepared for you. Battle of Europe is a very fun mode, following a Risk-like style reminiscent of those of Dawn of War Black Crusade and Rise of Nations campaigns. You control one of the playable factions, and you have to, well, conquer Europe. Dealing with resources, alliances, sabotages, trade, territory disputes and, of course, actually battling your enemies, this is the highlight of the single player side of the game. Sadly, it has its problems. For starters, once you beat it, you can’t replay it again unless you create another profile, which is a puzzling design decision. You’d think they would push the best part of the game as much as possible, but they decided not to. This would have been great if expanded, maybe even mod-support to add more maps, scenarios and levels of difficulty, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be.  

Gameplay has two mechanics that differentiate this game from other RTS. First is the need to organize your units into formations. Your barracks have the option to produce soldiers constantly, and once you reach a set of soldiers of the same class (usually 120, but there are smaller specific units) you can create a formation. This will allow them to act in a more organized way, adding options to their movements and attacks, as well as boosting their morale. You can upgrade said formations by adding special units, which will improve their morale. Formations will have to take care of certain elements, though. Stamina will drain if they make movements over certain areas or if they move too much time without stopping. Lowered stamina will cause a decrease of health, attack and morale. The troop’s morale is also very important, and it’s probably the most vital element you’ll have to take care of while battling your enemies. The morale goes up every time you kill or disband a formation, and will go down if you suffer too many losses at once or you suffer a volley of fire too close. If the morale goes below a certain level, your troops will start to run away, and even below that, and your formation will run away. The surviving troops will try to go back to the base, but they usually fall prey to enemy cavalry, and fugitive troops will lower allied formation’s morale too. Finally, you’ll have to take care of the number of troops you have on each formation. If they suffer too many losses, no matter how big their morale is, and you’ll lose said formation. Squads that have managed to survive and win many battles will become veteran troops (after 300 kills), which will grant them a massive morale boost, as well as attack. You want to keep said veteran formations alive and well supplied, because they can be a very obvious objective for your enemy. The other mayor distinctive point is the road system. Each map has a series of roads to move your troops from one place to another. Moving them across the map without using this system will drain their stamina fast, so controlling certain crosses and areas becomes an imperative. It’s frequent to see massive battles occurring on crossroads and important resource points, thanks also to the game allowing to have more than 6000 units at once (although reaching that number is pretty difficult without multiple players at the same time). This massive battles can take forever to end, because of the accumulation of more and more troops on a single point of the map, but if you are able to break morale of your troops and cause a chain reaction of deserters, it is a spectacle to behold. More specific units like sappers and scouts will not need to use these roads, but they’ll also be very vulnerable to any kind of attack.

The game has nine different factions to play with: France, Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia, Egypt, and three nations not represented in the original NW game, Spain, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (Poland), and the Confederation of the Rhine. Each one has their strengths and weaknesses. There are three kinds of military unit in this game, infantry, cavalry and artillery. Most factions have three or four kinds of infantry, with every faction having at least one unique unit. Most of them have some sort of musketeer or equivalent, and most of them have access to gunpowder weapons, which take forever to reload (but that is understandable, considering it took a couple of minutes to recharge a musket). Cavalry is divided into light and heavy cavalry, and it’s used to attack enemy units when low in stamina or to try and outflank them. However, in my personal experience with the game, I’ve never felt that heavy cavalry can do anything that light cavalry can’t. It’s more expensive, slower to create, slower to move around and it is not that much better in hand to hand combat. Finally, artillery is the slowest and most limited military unit in terms of allowed numbers, but in the appropriate hands it can be a very destructive force, breaking sieges and fortifications with little effort. Most units have the ability to take advantage of the terrain (musketeers will shoot better and cavalry charges are more effective if they have the high ground, troops can hide in forests to protect themselves from artillery and enemy volleys, swamps become natural barriers that drain stamina much faster, hiding behind buildings will shield troops from enemy attacks…). Unlike the other Cossacks games, Cossacks II doesn’t have aquatic units, focusing entirely on land battles, which is sad, it could’ve included some form of variety outside of how typically most battles play out.

On the base building and economy side of things, the game centers on the capture and control of towns and mines. All across the map, you will find towns that produce a single type of resource (food, iron, gold and coal), and you have to capture them to get said resources. Controlling the most of this places will be essential for your economy. Gold allows you to upgrade and buy special units, iron is needed to create most types of military units, coal is needed for gunpowder and artillery, and food is needed to keep your armies well fed, so they don’t starve and lose morale. Other resources (wood and stone) are extracted by your own villagers, and they mostly serve to build your own base. A player can automatically win if it controls all resource points in the map, although by that point the rest of the players are probably long defeated anyway. On that note, there is a bit of a problem with map variety. Maps are not randomly generated, there are a limited number of maps in the game, and after a while playing, smart player will know what to attack first and with what to deprive their opponents from the essential resources. This limits the longevity of the game quite a lot, and can make a lot of the games seem the same.

Graphics and art design are quite good for a game this old. The game has a pretty good design and adds a lot of historical detail for each of the faction’s units and buildings, although the irregular form of some of the buildings means that some can only go on certain areas, which is a shame. For example, the biggest fortress available in the game can barely be use due to its monstrous size, and the place where it can be placed in aren’t that important they need a massive fortification like that. Maybe that is a commentary on how the XIXth century saw the definitive disappearance of massive fortresses as viable military defensive structures, but it would’ve been nice to use them in the game. Music is decent, but the tracks are a bit overdramatic and they repeat too frequently.

Cossacks II is a decent experiment on RTS mechanics, although considering it came out around the time when games like Age of Empires II: The Conquerors, Age of Mythology, Dawn of War and Company of Heroes were still new and fresh in the minds of people, and while Cossacks II does a lot of things well, it sadly doesn’t have enough punch to differentiate itself from the sea of great RTS coming around in the 2000s. Lack of maps and unit options damper a game that already lacked the speed and depth of gameplay of its competitors, but it is otherwise a great game. Sadly, GSC Game World went back to the structure of the original Cossacks, abandoning the roads and the formations mechanics to try and offer a more traditional RTS experience. I just hope they keep this format around, even if it is in the form of a Cossacks spinoff, or even better, update the original BfE to meet today’s standards. Improve the resolution, make it compatible with modern OS, bring online back, add more maps and battles, make an editor mode and allow mod support. I know it is probably too much to hope for a very small game, but they are still selling it on Steam and GOG, so it would be nice to see. Other similarly small games have done so already, so there's no reason not do do it here too.