Battle of Trafalgar
Obviously developers GSC Game World have spent a lot of time making Cossacks 2: Battle for Europe accessible to the new player as well as keeping in plenty of detail for the seasoned wargamer. The interface is fairly intuitive (though a couple of the icons and menus could do with a brush up) and getting your troops to do what you want is pretty easy, even if you choose to just dive in and play referring to the manual when you get stuck… like I did. Often.
Having lost a few battles in outright routs, I did a quick bit of reading and discovered that placing troops on high ground increases their range of fire. Now I know this sounds obvious, but I’m used to RTS games with lasers, hover tanks and guided missiles, so this was a rather cool new feature I’d just discovered. Further, each unit with ranged fire has a series of coloured bands around them that shows how effective their fire will be at different ranges.
Click for larger imageStick the same units up on a hill and their range increases greatly. You’ll still have to battle with the fact that back then pretty much every cannon and musket was wildly inaccurate, but at least it means that the enemy will be within your effective range before you’re in his. A way to further increase the effectiveness of your troops is to use the formations, thinking long and hard about where they are and the surrounding terrain.
Graphically, Cossacks 2: Battle for Europe isn’t much to write home about, not when compared to upcoming RTS games like Maelstrom, World In Conflict or Company Of Heroes but what is here does the job well enough. You can zoom in and out of the landscape to pick up on the more intricate details of war and although they’re sprite based, the unit themselves are nicely animated and go through all the motions of marching and firing and, with me as their general, dying… a lot.
Click for larger imageBut that’s all the single player and skirmish mode stuff, what about the Battle for Europe mode, which the game has obviously been named after?
The easiest way to describe the Battle for Europe mode is to say that it’s a bit like RISK, in that you use a mixture of alliances, diplomacy, trading and aggression. It’s one of those apparently enormously complicated games that takes ages to understand and even longer to win. In reality Battle for Europe is pretty easy to get to grips with but by God do the games go on! All I can say is that you’d better have an ‘always on’ broadband connection and a bumper pack of Pro-plus as two seasoned players can keep a game going for ages. That’s not to say it’s not fun, because it is, but if you’re used to a quick fix of strategy you’d better bring a toothbrush and sleeping bag, just to be on the safe side.
Click for larger image