Victorian Admirals

Terrible, nothing to do but steer a slow ship. The player can't control the gunnery. DO NOT BUY.

Game pretty much completely leaves out the player, all you can do is control the rudder in three positions. No gun control, no damage control, target selection, speed, nothing. Not worth 99 cents, much less $20. This is the gaming equivalent of a gofundme account for someone who's broke because they had three kids and blew their welfare check on cigarettes and vodka.

I really enjoy historical naval combat games and that was the reason I have titles such as Empire, Napoleon and Shogun 2 Total War Fall of the Samurai. Then, I had been researching about 19th century naval warfare but unfortunately there are not trully interest aside Totem Games and Fall of the Samurai DLC to make games set in this fascinating era. Victorian Admirals is focused on 4 historical scenarios set in 1880s: Caroline Island Crisis 1885; Panama Crisis 1885; Marianas Incident 1887; Samoan Crisis 1889. The ships of the period are transitional between sailing ships and pre-dreadnought with steam powered engines. There is a great variety of ship models including gunboats, light and heavy frigates and monitors. The ship models are trully detailed, especially the damage textures, and the environment graphics look good as well with beautiful colors set in the Pacific and Caribbean. I also enjoy the engine and cannon sounds. For those who complain about the lack of customization, the game is indeed customizable. Just go to Victorian Admirals and you will find a file Config where you can customize video settings and sounds settings, including music if you don't want to hear music while playing or to lower the volume of the music. I have this game maxed out and the graphics improve substantially, take a look at my video on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-fGpl1Ll_w I am glad Totem Games has another games covering other conflicts of this era: American Civil War, Chincha Islands War, Anglo-Russian War among others. The next title of Ironclads II War of the Pacific will cover another new and exciting conflict between Peru and Chile. I Can't wait for the release!!

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.

Stay away from this game. When I first saw this series it seemed like a brilliant idea, ironclad vs ironclad hasn't really been done before but the game is completly uninished and has a complete lack of almost evreything. It takes forever to play even a single engagement, you can't control your guns, you can only control a few ships at a time not the whole fleet, no custom battles or even any customisation of the game at all, you can't even get a list of the key bindings and in all honesty I baught this at 90% off on a steam sale. I wish I hadn't waisted my money. Very few people will find this game worth any amount of time because there is really nothing to do at all and you'll be bored out of your mind so you're much better off going saving your money and doing some digging for another game

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

This game may be a bit boring at times but its fun to play on days when theres nothing to do and its cheep i recomened it its $3.00

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-managing your forces was at all possible – give this a go.

This game gave me cancer.

Oh, I want this ships in Irocnalds 2. Lack of content but battle with this ships is much interesting than for first iron claded ships.