The long-touted piece de resistance of Cossacks has been the 8,000 units raging war at any one time without slowdown. What was promised is most certainly delivered. Another selling point was the historical accuracy of the campaign missions, covering periods such as the English Civil War and Thirty Years War played out across authentic terrain and maps. On this we'll take their word for it. Er, not exactly.
Battles are swiftly over and far too chaotic to be engaging.
For starters, units have a nasty habit of disobeying tactics to pursue an almost kamikaze strategy of charging opponents - a crippling flaw when resources for creating new forces are scarce. A paltry number of campaigns might be compensated by length, but each is carefully scripted and stultifyingly linear to offer any reply value. Then there's the resource management aspect which can't decide if it wants to be a major factor in your eventual success or a user-friendly feature, which rewards vigilance and patience. It's neither, and so becomes an annoyance to the cut and thrust of battles. On the rare occasions time is allocated to develop a plan, the game leaps from average to rather good.