Cossacks: European Wars

Well this game was sort of dissapointing, when the preview I read a couple years ago said "Command thousands of units on screen at once!" I was tickled pink to say the least, then I played it. Now the number is not an exaggeration, but the term "command" is. I'll get more into that later, I'd say if there's one aspect that really brings this game out is the use of actual historical battles that are fairly accurate and very well done.

Gameplay:
Definetly the achiles heel here, I was mentioning the large numbers involved and I'll tell you right now that moving thousands of men into combat is about as difficult as it would be in real life. The buildings and tech tree are fairly standard, yet the placement of walls and buildings is tedious and things don't seem to function on a grid building system like most RTS's. The computer is fairly challenging, especially in campaign mode. Frontal assaults don't work as much as sieges, I try to do a combination of the two, but a siege is the most effective. The most major thing that makes this Strategy game different from all others is the ability to capture enemy peasants, buildings, and artilery. This can be surprisingly annoying, so you have to place guard troops around your workers and towns.

Graphics:
I think these graphics are some of the most simple, yet spectacular I've seen in an RTS. The water and trees aren't as advanced as some games like Empire Earth, but I don't think the graphics are bad at all. The smooth unit animations are great, especially in the fast mode.
The character models are somewhat cartoonish but it works well when there is an excess of
a thousand units on the huge environments.

Sound:
Nothing special, nothing annoying, nothing great. The music is alright, you can skip tracks when you come across one you don't like. The unit acknoledgements aren't tireseome like some games. I'm indifferent in this category.

Replay:
Random map generator, long campaigns, multiplayer, and so on, lead to quite a bit of replay. Lack of a map editor really confuses me, the enviroments wouldn't be that difficult to duplicate. Maybe they'll include one in an expansion.

Summary:
Gameplay - 80
Graphics - 85
Sound - 80
Replay - 90
Total - 87 (not an average)