Victorian Admirals

Victorian Admirals is an older game from 2012. It's a venerable 13 years old at the time of this review. But that's not the problem. This [i]looks[/i] like a great Victorian era naval fleet battle game, and I can understand why anyone might be fooled... but it's so shallow it's almost a joke. This is barely a screensaver of a game. Basically you just give 1-2 simple orders to your ship and wait and watch to see what happens... and of course there's no "Fast forward", so it's a plodding snails pace. This barely qualifies as a game. The technical implementation is almost as bad! From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While people have pointed out the graphics are underwhelming, and I'm certainly the first to object if a game has bad graphics, I think if the rest of the game was good enough, then the graphics are okay enough to overlook. But the rest of the technical stuff is so, so bad. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on an…

Well, I got this game from a bundle and it was probably less than $1. I fought my first battle that I felt was a victory but there is no victory. So you spend about 1hour to 30mins (depending on the game speed, which amounts to normal, fast, pause), tell your flag ship the speed and where to turn, then you just sit there and watch your ship do things xD When the timer runs out, you just get a battle ended and nothing happens. You cant do anything but load a scenario and look at it =p If you are thinking specifically to buy this game for some reason, I'd advice not. If it's part of a bundle, I guess that's ok. I guess the positive side to this game is the ship models are nice and it doesnt take much storage space xD

First of all – look at the negative comments. The are nearly all true. So why is my positive? I knew exactly what I was buying. A game, that is not fast paced and that gives me the exact amount of control that a commander of the late XIX century would have over his ships – setting course and speed of the lead ship are the only tools at your disposal. That is all you have to make best use of the strengths of your ships and to deny the enemy theirs. The game itself definitely isn’t fast paced and full of action. You need 1 – 1,5 hours of free time for each day of each scenario. Also each engagement is unbalanced – as it should be. The opposing fleets are composed of different types of ships and have different strong and weak points. At first glance one side has an obvious advantage, but it is definitely possible, to gain victory using both. This isn’t a game for everyone. Not even for everyone that is interested in naval conflict. It’s easy to see how the game could be much better (the lack of ramming damage, comes to mind and many, many more things). On the other hand if you want to be challenged and try to step into the boots of a naval commander from the age before micro-mana…

Seems to be a bunch of "what-if" scenarios. Might be what differentiates it from the Ironclad series. Has four games in one package. The games are slow and cumbersome, and there seems to be a high "learn-as-you-go" learning curve. Frankly, not sure I should recommend it. Thing is, I think they are selling these four as separate games also. Just, this one at regular price costs the same as two of those. And if you get it on discount (like I did), you might get this one for less than half the price of one!

nah

This game should have more potential. The controls are lacking in options, there's only 3 speed settings, and go either ahead or to port or starboard. Command of the 2 squadrons is made only on the leading vessel and it can only be either open fire or cease fire. As for the battles, it's always 2 vs. 2 squadrons, both starting outside gun range. there's no variety, and the AI is lacking, with minimal information provided. The player can't detach vessels, can't receive other information except a vessel fall out of line or is destroyed. Time passes slowly, you can speed up to 2x, but still all battles take a long time of vessels shooting, and shooting, and missing, and hitting, sometimes one of them is seen on fire, there's uncontrolled flooding, etc, etc... Boring battles, the scenery doesn't excite much. The only good goo thing is the music, which gets annoying fast. Wasted potential on this game.