Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts

It saddens me to say that this game had so much potential, but even after all these updates, it still, unfortunately, falls short. A few years ago, this game seemed so promising—I had an absolute blast playing it back then, with the expectation that the bugs I encountered would eventually be patched out and that it would evolve into an awesome naval warfare game. But sadly, that never happened.

As others have said: this game is abandonware now.

The devs had something special here, even given how janky it was at times, but they decided to concentrate on something literally noone asked for: multiplayer.

That's right. Instead of concentrating on making the designer function properly, or optimizing the base gameplay, or improving the AI, or making the campaign mode worth a damn, they decided to focus on adding something that the game was NOT ready for and that the playerbase made VERY clear we did not want.

And the multiplayer mode was trash (or so I've heard I haven't played it) and it didn't even come with the base game.

TLDR: the devs abandoned the game that was in a rather shaky state to make a half-baked MP mode (that was PvP only) that noone wanted, and when it expectedly bombed they decided to abandon the game. Well done idjits.

It is a beautiful and fun game. However, the interface was clearly created by a special retard that needs a kick in the head to reset him or her. Fucking seriously. It can be infuriating. 5/10 because of that.

Fun, very laggy on higher graphics when building sometimes. Super fun just to send out strong battleships and watch them fight, or for scenario enjoyers as well.

it is an exceptional naval simulation that lets you design and command powerful warships along the years. With deep customization, intense battles, and detailed graphics. The historical component adds extra depth. Many improvements can be applied in the future, but I think that as for today this is the best strategic naval warships game.

This games has been abandoned without warning, the developing team does not exist any more - so the chance for an update is like the survival chance of a snowflake in hell.
It had a promising idea and concept, and imho could have been great - but it seems funding ran out.
If you want to simply build some ships and blow stuff up, go for it. If you expect tactical and strategic gameplay, don't bother. The AI is a crapshot, best example is if the AIs forces are weaker than yours, it will simply run away with ships made to impossible designs - well, impossible for the player that is.

The campaign lacks several features or has severe bugs that make playing a pain in the ass. A few examples
a) Invading minor nations:
This mechanic is completely out of the control of the player. You cannot interfere with it in any shape, way or form. If a minor nation is attacked or is attacking someone, you can't do anything to help or hinder.
b) Naval Invasions:
Let's say the enemy has a few measly islands in the pacific. Let's also say you go for overkill and send a few million tonnes of ship there, despite the invasion requiring about 50k tonnes. The invasion will still take a few months, up to half a year - and if a single enemy destroyer enters the contested area, there is a good chance the counter is reset.
c) Economy:
There is a real chance, that your economy just goes to hell for no apparent reason. One month you are 700k in the green, the next you are over a billion in the red - without any change in fleet strength, maneuvers, battles, repairs, building status, or the outbreak of war or peace.

i bought it wanting to watch another game develop as i play every here and then but then i read the new patch notes saying that its getting no more updates. it had real promise but the devs didnt seem like they wanted to even develop the game at all.

The game has an amazing concept and it's fun to play. But the game has been abandoned by the developers too early. It's not finished.

This is a wonderful game that was cut short FAR TOO EARLY. Boo to the publishers! I love the strategic feel of it where you aren't entirely in control of the country. (you control the navy and operate with the given budget) It makes thing very interesting and the tactical side when in combat was very satisfying. There are definitely bugs to iron out but the overall experience was fantastic and it's a crime this is no longer being developed.

I sincerely hope the modding community is able to further the game and bring out the potential this game had. This game gave me Creative labs vibes and I was excited to see it finished

I loved seeing the game progress when it was being developed, hoping that it would be made into something great.

BUT, that something great is now never to come. This game is now in "full release", but in reality it is abandonware. It is still filled with bugs and performance issues, never to be fixed.

If you do want to get it, wait for it to be on sale as it is not worth the full price.

I enjoyed this game on and off. I enjoy putting battleships against impossible odds and winning.... But something change the AI is constantly changing targets causing slow reload Battleship guns to make ranging shots before shooting all guns though the constant AI changing targets causes you never to fire all guns and you sail to your death with a bunch of swing and a miss ranging shots. AI will switch even when your above 70% chance to hit . It has really soured this game for me

Had great potential in it's earlier stages, sad to see the devs moved on from this game.

This game had some ups and downs, good updates followed by bad ones. Unfortunately it has been abandoned after a bad update. I really enjoyed this game for many hours but I cannot recommend it with the last and final update leaving the game in a bad state.

Was one of my favorite games and they abandoned it and left it in a very bad state. stay away

Abandoned, bad performance, absolutely nonsensical AI, broken mechanics, theres a lot to complain about here.
Ultimately left to die, if you want a good naval sim buy Rule the Waves instead.

Yes, Unfortunately GameLabs is basically dead and the game will not recieve updates in the near future, but I still LOVE this game. There are still dozens of Mod projects on this game, from minor ones to major mods including one I plan on coding! But the base game itself is a very good one, and at times can feel boring but is overall a really fun game that fills my desire for shipbuilding at a simple, modular level.

The game is blatantly unfinished with countless features simply never added, from islands to proper submarines to carriers to better placement of parts on ships without as much annoying snapping.
Now, the devs have abandoned the game. Nothing promised or suggested will ever be added.

The last update also completely wrecked the games performance in battles, regardless of how beefy your computer is. I've corroborated this with players using 4000 series GPUs and other similar hardware which chug when playing, and my own 1650Ti could run the game without issue up until recently despite being an order of magnitude weaker, handling battles with dozens of ships without a problem and now struggling at 10 or less. Sinking ships seem to be extremely performance intensive now, possibly fire too, with it being especially noticeable and egregious in some naval academy missions or convoy hunts in campaigns where you can expect to sink multiple transports in seconds. Doing so can reduce the game to a crawl.

That the devs have left the game in this state is a travesty, and I earnestly believe it should be delisted in its present state.

Campaign can be a bit laggy once you get to the later stages & have hundreds of ships, but overall a pretty fun experience. Love the ship design mode and its super satisfying conquering territory with the help of your naval presence/support. A shame that they are no longer updating it... couldve done so much more with it. Buy it on sale

Great game, but the systems concerning hit rate have some points to improve. In this game, the way a bullet doesn`t hit the mark is, seeing behavior of bullets, rely on the hit rate that decided for each guns depending on a distance from targets. It appears that bullets do not hit because the zone of dispersion is too large, but they fly to some point away from target in small zone of dispersion, and only an outlier hits the mark. It`s like as if there is another transparent target and most of bullet fly to there, and an exception(how many exceptions exists seems to be decided from the hit rate) goes to the actual target. If this unnatural behavior is modified, the game experience will be much more great.

Pulling the AI from your fleet management made the game unmanageable. Controlling every TB squadron and destroyer flotilla in a battle takes the more attention and time than one person has. I don't understand how the CPU AI manages it's fleet well, but giving the player a tenth of that for fleet management AI was beyond the programmer's capabilities.

it is a game that you should play if you are into ships and war it can be a little anoying but it is deffinently worth it

Fun Game, a bit like Rule the Waves in actual play but much better as its not 2D can you can see whats going on of course there is bugs as they are still updating it but the theme/idea makes this game a go to for all the naval nutts.

Campaign needs tons of work, still very bugged and flawed

DEAD GAME.

Do not buy. Half baked game where the devs threw themselves in every directions instead of working in blocks or a step by step way.

Unoptimized and overly graphical. Sure, it looks nice, but too much of the budget went into graphics and not enough into the game itself.

U.I. is horrible. You can get over 16 popups in one turn... I had like 21 one time. Sometimes the scrolling with the mousewheel works, sometimes it does not. It depends on where you are pointing which should not matter if you are in a scrollable area like zooming or scroll up and down a list.

So many bad things about this game, many are small but the accumulation makes it terrible.

THe strategic aspect of the game is dumb. They should have stayed in Europe and the Mediteranean. Going for a world map, that does not scroll left or right at the end, you need to scroll all the way to the other end of the map to check ou the other side.

Amateurish design made by a dying company who prefers making cheap, shallow and soulless phone games.

When the game works it's fun. The starting load times for campaigns are long.
Loading into the shipyard to design or refit a ship can take over 5 minutes for each ship. The more ships and designs you have the longer it takes to load up.
I've played it a good bit but have never finished a campaign. The waiting 5 minutes to design or refit a ship gets to be slog and kills the fun.

maybe dont buy full prices theres a lot of issues that'll never be fixed but its still very fun (if you like ships and being utterly exterminated by ships with 60000 torpedos and heavy cruisers that only use single gun turrets for better firing rates:) )

Ship designing is good, researching method not the best but ive totally ignored it and my ships still work.

Your army is garbage and youll lose half you possesions and you wont be able to do anything about it

Submarines suck

Politics system not great

but still enjoyable enough (on beginner at least)

Dreadnought improvement project (mod) will supposedly fix a lot of it but i cant get it to work for the life of me, but if you do get it to work its a fairly functional game, plus you can play more nations :)

Due to the recent events, more precisely the game development being largely abandoned, I do not recommend purchasing this game with its current state, at least at a full price.
Overall I'm very positive opinion about this game's concept: It's very unique in its genre, allowing you to "mass produce" numerous ship classes and then build them in large quantities, later to be fought in fleet battles or local engagements. With the strategy part, your actions actually make sense and the battles have consequences.
Sounds great on the paper, but it's very far from being perfect: the enemy's fleets most likely would consist of 30 Destroyers and good luck sinking them all before they reach you. It gets worse in the later game, close to 1930s, where EACH AND EVERY ship class made by the AI will have 30+ torpedoes onboard with 22km range.
In the actual Dreadnought era (1906-1920s), when you deal with the destroyers, the battles will actually be interesting and epic.
Or you could just do a custom battle with your own designs to avoid the problems above which apply only to the Campaign mode.

With a bleak future the dev team has doomed this game into, just don't waste your money on it. There are other promising sandbox games, cheaper and with a better future.

The creators of this game should re-work their company-internal processes and re-define when work is actually finished. This game leaves the impression of a raw diamond at best.

It is An Alright game. I do like the ship building but i dispise the Naval combat in this game. I really wanted this to be a Great game but now that it is abandoned i do not see why you should buy this game.

the game has been abandoned by the developers and isnt worth the price with there being better alternatives like NavalArt or From The Depths

Developer has abandoned this game. Absolutely amazing bones. Its a fantastic concept and very fun.

But it was hung and left to rot on the rope.

I love this game so much! Just got it last week. If you love naval history and love geography this is absolutely the game for you. Very sad to hear this game is no longer getting updates. Maybe a UA:D 2?

Development ended, no mod support.
They never finished the multiplayer game mode after several years of work in beta and early access and releasing what they had as a $15 separate DLC (what?)
Its still only a bare bones buggy 1v1 only, with no possibilities of co-op.
Unfinished cash grab abandonware, it had a lot of potential that will never be realized.

abandonware. Many features just feel incomplete. Such a shame I trusted them.

$35 for a mid game. You can either have a fleet the game can run or a fleet that can actually protect the country but at 5 fps. Recent update feels less optimized than the last. It's missing a ton of features that could at least make the low-frame gameplay a little more fun. To top it all off, the game is abandoned and now I want a refund for this piece of crap.

This game is a great game, I really like it when war happens and I fail horribly. :)

This game is the only thing that filled the niche role of a ship building combat game that I have found, and so I pains me to say that you shouldn't buy it. I do love this game, it can be fun at times, but it is also a buggy mess. It has so many issues that were never fixed, and now that is has been abandoned, never will be fixed. If you NEED a ship building and combat game and are ok with playing a buggy, unfinished game that has no hope of being finished, go ahead and buy it, but I can't in good concience tell anyone to buy it full price.

I can add as many guns to a ship as I want, absolutely great game, I lose frames every time my masterpiece shoots its guns, would recommend!

Now Abandonware - without clear communication. And when communication was done beforehand, the community itself was insulted.

It has flaws, and I recommend playing version 1.5, but damn it if I don't keep coming back and back and back again. Such a great time overall.

Want this game to go so much further than it is. However, despite it's performance problems, it is still the only game out there I have found that does a great job in how navies are built and the combat navies went through before the aircraft carrier.

The shipbuilding is very complex and in depth, but is by far the biggest highlight of this game. I've spend many hours in the shipbuilder, and I've enjoyed every second of it. However, the campaign is utterly unplayable. The UI, the optimization, and the mechanics are just not fleshed out and some just don't make sense. It's a shame, because this game has the potential to be the greatest naval combat/strategy game of all time.

Great game love the concept
2 issues
1. game is done no more updates
2. No mod support to keep the game interesting and adding more to do

They made sure to destroy the modding scene right before ending development and support and then going out of business.

Perfect fatality, no notes.

(don't buy it, they left it in a terrible state)

This is a great concept. The game gives offers campaign play as well as custom u-pick sea battles, and I love the shipbuilding intricacies. I wish there were ready-made templates for historical warships. I don't want to have to create BB Yamato from scratch to have a really historical battle. And, besides the occasional PC freezes I've experienced while shipbuilding and in beginning battles, I'm really not fond of getting the stuffing beat out of me in campaigns. True, I've played as only the three weakest nations (A-H, China, Spain) so far, and I'm probably a dullard, but I'm lucky to last 10 years before other nations gang up and obliterate my navy. And this is on Beginner mode! I also don't like being unable to make strategic attacks on ports, regions, countries. You just have to wait for the AI to decide that your nation's army is going to attack such-and-such -- which at least for the minor nations i've played -- is never. How do you win? Or even make a plan?
Oh the game is still fun for someone who's into warships and naval battles as I am, but what's the point of fighting a losing battle -- OR playing if you know you will win because you're playing one of the powerhouse navies??? Ideally I'd like the ability to recreate a grand WWII campaign, but that won't ever happen because the game isn't being supported anymore I hear, and we're seeing it's final update. Sad.

this is a promising game with a nice premise, but was let down by a bad developer

this game is very buggy and left in an almost incomplete state, so if youre thinking about getting this game get one of the mods that fix it and make it functional

A very fun - and addictive (just one more month) battleship game which allows you to design your own battleships, fine-turning various aspects of their performance, firepower and armour. You can test them against AI designs/enemies and see how they handle with auto-calculation, or try and take command of them in real-time and micro manage your course, speed and priority targets.

Similar to Atlantic Fleet, without the aspect of the player calculating firing solutions - your AI crew will do their best, modified by their skill and experience, equipment, the state of their ship and the weather etc.

The campaign is fun and addictive, as you play a Fleet Admiral and guide a nation's navy to supremacy and the government bends to your wishes. Time passes a month at a time, and the flags of the world's states change as time passes, which I thought was a cool feature.

Some reviews may say the game freezes in the 1940s, but my current campaign is at 1952. It's possible this is a hardware issue, and if you have a good rig it will brute force it's way onwards through increasingly huge calculations.

Nice world map, charming ship design screen, and simple but good graphics during ship battles.

Watching a full broadside of six 19 inch guns completely obliterate an enemy battleship in a single salvo never gets old!

I love it, and I would recommend it if you enjoy:
- military machines like tanks/aircraft/ships/subs
- turn based strategy games
- designing your own war machines and seeing how they succeed or fail
- pressing "next turn"

It may not be getting any more attention from the developers, but what is here definitely justifies the price.
If it ever gets thoughtful mods, (like cold war tech, designs, aircraft carriers, extended campaign events and functions) it could be truly incredible.

The game is pretty good and can give you some pretty cool screenshots, but after just a little bit of playing you start to realize that every boat you make looks the exact same. Making anything smaller than a Heavy Cruiser is basically impossible due to the fact all the hulls for the smaller ships take up 90% of your displacement budget without any addons. Campaign doesn't make much sense either, an entire war isn't fought on the sea unlike how this game makes it seem.

Its pretty bad for the price since its no longer getting support and does not feels finished

I kept waiting for this game to be finished so I could actually leave it a solid review but I guess it's "Finished" now.