Maybe if the devs had taken inspiration from last year's other Napoleonic extravaganza, Imperial Glory, and cultivated their sea skirmishes (Naval combat was virtually non-existent in C2) then this pack would have generated a bit more enthusiasm. Perhaps if the expansion had shifted focus away from the Continent to one of the many asymmetrical conflicts that raged in Asia, Africa, or America during the early years of the Nineteenth Century, then there might have been more room for novelty.
The extra cavalry, cannons, and light and line infantry might have different-coloured uniforms and slightly different stats, but they are still cavalry, cannons, and light and line infantry.
As these are all European factions and the developers like their history straight and reverential, no particularly exotic or interesting units appear in the debuting armies. Take the three new playable powers - Spain, the Confederation of the Rhine, and the Great Duchy of Warsaw - for instance. They wont open fire without your permission but they'll happily leg-it.Īctually, even if GSC had sorted out the military micromanagement issue it would still be difficult to get really excited about much of the new content. Because it doesn't - troops still need to be carefully chaperoned through combat - the sizeable haul of new campaigns, factions, units, and historical scraps isn't nearly as appealing as it might have been. If C2:BFE had put this one thing right, it would have instantly validated itself. Yes, in what has to be one of the most eccentric game design decisions since EA put Michael Owen on the cover of Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, GSC left-out unit behaviour stances altogether, forcing flustered generals to reach for the pause button every few seconds during busy battles. See what I did there?Ĭossacks II - as Kieron's critique deftly identified - was a solid Napoleonic RTS with a distinctive wargame flavour, and one rather big, rather annoying flaw: musket-equipped formations would only fire if you personally gave them the order. Really, from here on it's all probing questions and sober analysis.
Okay, I promise there'll be no more hanus bum puns in this review. Developers GSC had the opportunity to rectumify this grievous situation with this standalone expansion for Cossacks II, but - criminally - they've parsed it up. (It's said that chronic piles limited the Little Corporal's mobility during the battle by keeping him out of the saddle). The Battle of Waterloo has been reproduced in videogame form on more than a dozen occasions and yet so far no-one has got round to modelling one of the most important factors in the French defeat - Napoleon's colossal haemorrhoids.
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