Victorian Admirals Reviews

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 any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game doesn't correctly account for modern PC displays, UI scaling isn't handled correctly. As a result of this unfortunate decision, text and UI elements don't display at a reasonable size, it's too small to be legible on most modern gaming PCs, and there's no in-game controls or options to correct this. This can render the game unplayable for many. Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying sound/background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop it using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. As a matter of fact the game doesn't really have a settings menu at all! Just start the game, pick from about 5 different canned battles... that's all there is to this. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 5 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 110,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? Victorian Admirals has the pathetically optimistic price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is an incredibly shallow and disappointing experience for that price point. For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "Metro Exodus", "Hearts of Iron IV" or "Europa Universalis IV". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.