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Almost, so close, but not quite . . .

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: January 04, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Cossacks reproduces the times, technologies and conflicts of 17th and 18th century Europe. You play the "Fredrick the Great" role, building your kingdom's supply base while defending yourself against your neighbors. Winning requires killing or capturing every last one of their peasants, which along the way means killing practically all of their troops, taking their strongpoints, and generally pissing in their beer.

From a military strategy gamer point of view, Cossacks is quite a lot better than other games of the same ilk. It reproduces the variety of weapons systems of the time: artillery, and heavy/light cavalry/infantry. And your chances of success are maximized if you follow tactical doctrines of the time: mix weapons systems, apply stronger against weaker, and exploit terrain for both offense and defense. It's comendable the way the game's designers originally intend to present players with a variety of strategic options. Your neighbors/enemies can be weakened by denying them logistical support (you get to take or bomb out their mineral deposits, etc) though they must ultimately be overrun.

But, but, but. The game's AI and interface [...stink]. And its design could be improved upon.

Without constant supervision your troops and citizens get dazed and confused and you spend half of your life trying to save them from an ugly death. Partly this is AI, but it owes more to the way the game's controls impose truly odd default behavior. (You want your troops to march somewhere and stay there, or once there to defend something and return to where you put them once their attackers are seen off).

And even if the interfaces/AI Were cleaned up, I still have issues with the design. The maps are simply too small, the logistics unrealistic, and the combat frankly odd. The presence of mules (and wagons) in some of the game's set pieces leads me to conclude that the designers had much broader ambitions for the logistics part of the game. (And it *really* *really* matters. A military strategy game without logistics is like football without sidelines.)

Although the weapons systems are all here, the nature of their inter-relationship is not handled well. Various kinds of troops performed differently against various kinds of enemy. I guarantee that if you gave me & three mates long, pointed sticks we could probably do a better job against even the best cavalry than the armoured heavy infantry in this game manages to, but we would be pretty much stuffed against a ten-year-old with a bows and arrows. All troops are assigned fixed, rather than relative, combat parameters.

However, I'm looking forward to the Cossacks: Art of War, which promises bigger maps and the capacity to edit the geography.

GREAT GAME

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 9
Date: August 18, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is a great strategy game for any age. It teaches young ones about geography and how gruesome war can be. Personally my son and I love it. Trust me its a great buy!

Someone who knows the time period.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: August 15, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game is great. There is some problems and bugs. One problem you probley will have if you play the computer is Sich Cossacks Raiding your town. This is easily fixed by a dozen or so Pikemen scatterd through the town on stand ground. The other problem I had was its lack of historical accuracy. Poland for instance was a 17th century power-house, but in this game they down grade the units so much its not worth playing. Turkey, Sweden, and Spain is the same situation. While Russia, and Ukraine(Part of Poland at the time) are powerhouses but shouldnt be. But there is an add-on comming out soon which is supposed to fix the problems and add 2 new nations to the game. The game has great strong points though. Unlike AOK your population acctually eats, walls have a stone/wood upkeep. This is a great game where the positave outweighs the negative. A must buy for anyone that is a fan of RTS games.

Would be great but BUGGY

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: May 21, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game has so much potential, but it is filled with fatal bugs and no patches have yet been announced to fix them. It constantly seizes and freezes, forcing you to reboot your whole system each time so saving often is key. However, in one hour of gaming, it froze 5 times on me, making it hardly an enjoyable experience. It is a shame that it does this, for it looks like it will be better than AOK. Nevertheless, the constant reboots are infuriating and will make me question ever buying a game from this company until I see the patches are out.

For those who wonder... I have a 700 Mhz Athlon with the latest 3dFX and 128 Mgs of ram. It is less than year old and is able to easily handle such games as Baldur's Gate II, Deus Ex and Mech Warrior 4. Hence, I can only blame the game.

Tactician's Dream

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: September 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I should imagine the technical & gameplay concepts have been covered fairly well by the other reviewers. I must re-iterate the complexity of the game itself coupled with the diverse tactics you can use makes this game a must for strategy loons. The graphics flow smoothly always, no hangups on installation or during running (even with 8,000 troops on screen). Apart from the selection of campaigns with preset missions, you can also design your own map & select your opponents. The artificial intelligence on this game is superb, but should you suspect your skills have exceeded the game (unlikely on hardest setting), try an internet game. This is utterly priceless, you can play in teams or alone and it's simply the best. I must warn you, 8 hours can disappear in the blink of an eye when doing this, you just keep playing again & again. Tip: When you start a net game that looks like it may take a while to conclude, make sure you have food near your PC as you'll be reluctant to leave the room!

So much work equals so much defeat

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: August 11, 2002
Author: Amazon User

When I first got this game I thought it would be just like a pre-colonial version of Age of Empires 2. One brutal defeat after another told me one thing: that this game was not nearly as good as AOE2. I consider myself a very good AOE player, (I can beat 4 hard enemys in less than 2 hours) but this is simply an hard. The main reason is that it's simply unrealistic. I build a whole army of soldiers and they get gunned down before they get half way to the enemy town. At the beginning this game can be fun building and gathering. Some of the missions are good also (including combat ones.) But like another reviewer said, "This isn't strategy it's a race." And I couldn't agree more.

Cossacks: Cool Games!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: June 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

About a year back, I got tired of playin AoE II, and then I was looking on the internet and..wow! Cossacks! As I looked at it, it made me want to buy it so I rushed down to the Gamestop and bought it for $30. It was worth it. I rushed home to play it. The campaigns are marvelous, as are the single player missions. After that, in October 2002, I bought Cossacks: The Art of War. With a slew of new missions and two new nations, heck! It's the best buy yet! I made my own scenarios with the editor and had a bunch of fun. Then, came Cossacks: Back to War, and I fell in love. With Mod1 by Baddog already installed, it made the game much more enjoyable with more historical context, now I'm hooked on Cossacks: Back to War, and American Conquest, another cool game!

Sounds: 9
Gameplay: 10
Replay-abilty: 10
Variety: 10

Overall: 10
This game is one of the best out there if you're a historical nut, and plus, now, it's only [item price]! So go out there and get it! :-D

Great game .... if it worked.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: May 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The demo was great, and so I bought the US version. Unfortunately, many people are having problems getting the US full version to work at all. Check out the discussion groups on (...) for more information.

I had to install a CD crack just to get the stupid thing working. I'd suggest waiting a couple weeks before you buy (hopefully they'll have a US patch by then).

It's an evolutionary step beyond the AOE and C&C types

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: June 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

But for a few flaws (more later) this game would earn five stars from a tough critic. I was always frustrated with the unit caps in AOE and the like, until I came along games like this and Shogun: Total War. I intentionally built a force of over 2000 pikeman in this game, just to see how many units I could crowd onto the screen! The game only slowed slightly when I moved them en masse, and I'm not running a particularly powerful computer - PII 350.

The variety of units is most impressive, and even more so are the vast number of upgrades. Many are difficult to obtain until you've built a large number of groups of peasants stone mining/cutting wood/harvesting crops, and then built mines to gather gold, coal, and iron.

The only frustration I have had, and it's been mentioned in another review, is that some of the mounted units are so fast that if one rides through your blossoming city early in the game, it will convert a large number of your buildings while you just helplessly try to chase it down. This is frustrating (and what I consider a computer cheat!) as when they are recaptured they take damage and often burst into flame, taking more damage until they rapidly are destroyed. It takes a coordinated effort of many peasants to repair these buildings, if you can do it in time, while you still try to get that one peskity mounted unit and keep it from capturing yet more of your forces.

The use of artillery is very impressive. The mortars can shoot over two screens' away from where they are positioned when you obtain all the increased range updates, making the trebuchets in AOE look paltry in comparison.

Overall, this is a very unique and enjoyable take on the genre.

Might convert me to real-time strategy games

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: June 13, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Most of my favorite games have always been turn-based. Age of Empires confirmed what I had read: that winning a real-time game was more about frantically clicking the mouse than about thinking: he who clicks fastest wins. When I discovered how similar in concept Cossacks was to AOE, I feared the worst-- but this time I was more patient and determined. Perhaps, too, the game helps by letting you slow it down enough to catch your breath, at least when no enemies are on the horizon. I'll probably always stick to the slower settings; but as I learn how to play this kind of game, I'm starting to enjoy it.

Meanwhile there are mental challenges enough, and although I hardly consider graphics a sine qua non for a fine game, they are very impressive and intriguing. The system requirements, only moderate by state-of-the-art standards, are used resourcefully. On both computers on which I have installed the game, the older of which barely meets the stated requirements and fails to run several other recent games, Cossacks has run solidly and without the bugs that a few others lamented. The only bug (as I see it) that I have noticed is that option settings are not always preserved in saved and retrieved games.

I am also happy with the substantial manual, except that it never defines, at least in any obvious place, some of the terminology (such as "life" and "time") figuring in the quantitative description of units and buildings. These are apparently important characteristics, but what, exactly, do they mean?

A few minor disappointments: at least in scenarios, the game gives no score. When you fulfill the objective, a quick screen announces "Victory achieved" and that's it. Nor does anything allow you either to measure either the passage of time in the game. So if you replay a scenario because you think you need the practice and can do better, how do you determine whether you're improving? It would also be handy to be able to determine the precise location of a feature on the map in terms of x and y co-ordinates.

All in all, this relative newcomer calls Cossacks well worthwhile.

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