Cossacks: The Art of War Preview
The Art of War will offer new historical missions and campaigns for Cossacks: European Wars, along with substantial new gameplay features.
Released in the spring of this year, Cossacks: European Wars was a real-time strategy game that featured traditional RTS gameplay in an unusual setting: Europe in the 16th through 18th centuries. Cossacks received mixed reviews but generated enough popularity to warrant a full-blown expansion pack from its creator, Ukrainian developer GSC Game World. Cossacks: The Art of War promises to offer plenty of new material, as well as improvements to the core gameplay.
The original Cossacks offered both the unexpected and the familiar. Cossacks' familiarity surfaced in its very traditional RTS formula: Peasants tilled the land, mined gold or iron, and erected new buildings. From your buildings, you'd generate and upgrade masses of new units for conquering your enemy. Cossacks was also familiar in the way it borrowed a lot from the winning formula of the Age of Empires games. The visual style, interface, certain unit functions, and a lot of the core gameplay of Cossacks felt very familiar to anyone who'd spent time with the Age of Empires series, though the armies in Cossacks were generally much larger.
Where Cossacks stood out was in its relatively obscure subject matter. Like other RTS games before it, Cossacks drew inspiration from history. Here, though, it was history that relatively few gamers in America, at least, were likely to know much about. You got to control obscure military units such as Xebecs, Serdiuks, and Spakhs from 16 nations such as Algeria, Saxony, and Portugal. The game let you revisit conflicts you usually only read about in college history textbooks, such as the Thirty Years War and the War of the Austrian Succession.
Cossacks: The Art of War will again bring European history alive, this time adding Denmark and Bavaria to the mix of nationalities at your disposal. You'll get six new single missions that will pit varied forces against one another. For instance, the Swedes, Russians, and Poles will wage war for the resources of the Baltic states, while the Ukrainians will fight off Turkish oppressors.
You'll also get five new single-player campaigns with around five missions each. These large-scale campaigns will focus on a diverse group of nations: Algeria, Austria, Poland, Prussia, and Saxony. You'll get to play out parts of the Thirty Years War, lead a group of North African pirates to glory (or infamy), and take the role of a 17th-century Polish knight defending his homeland from greedy neighboring states and internal strife. For both the campaigns and missions, you'll get to choose from four difficulty levels.
In addition to the single-player campaigns and missions, The Art of War will offer a new multiplayer mode called "territory capture," online player rankings, and six new multiplayer historical battles. These interesting clashes are varied both geographically and temporally. You'll get to play out parts of the battles of Dunbar and Marston Moor from the English Civil War, the battles of Mook and Newport from the Dutch War of Independence, the battles of Wittstock and Breitenfeld from the Thirty Years War, and others.
Cossacks: The Art of War Quick Links
Summary | Reviews | News | Previews & Features | Images | Videos | Downloads | Answers | Hints & Cheats | Forum
- cdv Software
- GSC Game World
- Historic Real-Time...
- Release: Mar 31, 2002
- ESRB: Teen
Games you may like…
-
Cossacks: Back to War
(PC) -
Cossacks II: Battle EU
(PC) -
Cossacks: European Wars
(PC) -
Shogun: Total War Warlord Edition
(PC) -
Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars
(PC)
Users who looked at content for this game also looked at these games.
See More Similar Games
2 Comments