LinuxGameCast Reviews – Cossacks 3 (BETA)

This week your intrepid heroes freeze, lose control, and hope the damn thing saved. Cossacks 3 faces the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: Cossacks 3 (BETA)
Webzone: Cossacks_3
Devel: GSC Game World
Engine: In-House “Lightweight” Engine
Price: 19.99 / CDN 21.99

Wazzat: Cossacks 3 is a rare combination of war, economy, army developing, building and upgrading that couldn’t be found in any game for the last 15 years. This deep RTS gameplay will return old fans in the golden ages of the genre and give newcomers a unique experience.

Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

Yall got anymore of them, threads?
You guessed it, it maxes out two threads at 100% so you best have plenty of gigajules.
This would not be a problem if it didn’t turn into a chug-fest when panning the map.
Or cause your units to become unresponsive for a full 30 seconds.
Oh, did I mention that it fails to capture the gerbil input?
But none of that matters since this motherf*cker locks up every 30 minutes.

J-

Gotta set selinux to permissive for this fucker to run. Or allow executable heap memory

P-

One thing to remember going forward, this is still in Beta.
That said, Beta shouldn’t mean the game freezes every 30 minutes and you lose all your progress since the last autosave.
You also can’t set resolution. That’s a big one!
Like Venn already mentioned, even though the game gives you an option to lock the cursor to the window, it doesn’t work.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

I think the game looks a bit of alright.
It’s definitely better than anything from the Total War series.
Really has a bright fantasy vibe and that’s important when your primary objective is slaughtering people.
On that topic, I would have liked a little bit of gore or at least a gib option.
Hell, I even liked the background music.
I most definitely had that point where I stopped and just had a listen.
Well done, that.
It does make with the beeps and boops while moving units and attacking but that can be largely ignored.

J-

There’s a bit of graphical whiplash here. The backgrounds look all spritey and almost hand drawn
The units are weird little unity looking action figures
Either way, the scale that this game operates means you don’t get a good chance to look too close
The background music is there, but it’s kinda repetitive and boring

P-

The graphics don’t look too bad if you bring everything up to 11.
If you do, though, the performance tanks! So that’s bad.
I also didn’t hate the background music, up until the game froze and that was the only thing apparently still working.

Total-

Control

V-

Using the arrow keys caused my arm-organ to go numb, that was new.

J-

Standard RTS fare with a twist!
- The hotkeys are fucking everywhere and nonintuitive!

P-

No rebindable controls, in 2017, means you get 2 chairs dinged right out of the box.

Total-

FUN

V-

I managed to finish the tutorials and start the first real campaign.
This is where the random freezing got real, son.
Nothing like taking 20 min and building up your business for a siege only to have the game freeze.
Yeah, up until that point I was really liking how the game was progressing.
Letting me get slaughtered to death and learn from my mistakes was most welcome.
How, fkn, ever, I spent 20min managing the construction of a FK tonne of cannons from three smiths and soon as I noped the first fort, you guessed it, it froze.
I quit right then and there with no small amount of grr.
Not so much about the crash but the fact that (up to that point) I was rather enjoying myself.

J-

I didn’t get any of the freezes that these guys got. If you don’t count the random autosave stalling your game
Honestly, this seems like just another 0-AD style RTS. I don’t have anything against them, but they don’t do anything for me
There’s some economics and espionage, but for this most part this is a combat driven RTS
Once you got me micromanaging units on a large combat scale, you lost me.

P-

As much as RTS games bore me to tears, there have been exceptions over the years.
The first one I really enjoyed was the RTSiest of RTS games, Age of Empires 2.
And Cossacks 3, for those 30 minutes it let me play it at a time, it managed to capture that same style of play and I honestly didn’t hate it.
Which makes it all the worse when it did freeze and the frustration kicked in.
I don’t play games to be frustrated, which is why I’m probably not going to continue playing Hyper Light Drifter, on stream. But that’s not what we’re here for.
Cossacks 3, keeping in mind that it is a Beta, doesn’t hold up to even its incomplete status.
Because it’s not incomplete, it’s broken.

Total-

Final –