The roster of playable sides is increased here considerably – you can play as Egypt, Russia, France, England, Prussia, Austria, Spain, Warsaw and The Rhine Confederation. Diplomacy, alliances and trading play a part alongside great battles. Europe is divided into 24 provinces and nine nations compete over them.
This mode will be familiar to any of you who’ve dabbled with Risk, or any of the Total War games for that matter. If you do want some more complexity in your campaign, there’s the Battle of Europe mode. There’s no resource shifting or logistics to worry about, but only raw, ground-level combat on the battlefield. While there are conventional RTS mechanics in Cossacks 2, in these missions you’re spared the economics.
Each of these has its own singleplayer campaign with up to seven missions in each. So what’s new in this standalone release? We have new nationalities to play as – Spain, Duchy of Warsaw and The Confederation of the Rhine. Generals such as Blucher, Wellington and Napoleon moved divisions around Europe like chess pieces in an effort to outwit the other. The subject matter is 18th and 19th century warfare – the days of grand armies marching in rows, dressed in colorful uniforms and firing volleys of musket fire at each other. Gorgeous and regal, but still incomplete.Ĭossacks II covers a period of history which you don’t usually see represented in gaming, and it’s done so with a ludicrous amount of visual detail, right down to individual french farms and harvested fields.