Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts

Dont get me wrong, I love this game and really wish I could recommend it. HOWEVER, the game is abandoned and remains priced way higher than it should. I've owned this game since before it was even available on steam and supported it as much as I could due to just how awesome the concept was, unfortunately corporate greed beget its death, and it remains full price in a buggy and rather unfinished state. I hope that the updates continue one day but I highly doubt it.

Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts is a game I genuinely want to love. There’s a deep, satisfying joy in designing ships, testing them in custom battles, and seeing your fleets go toe-to-toe with AI adversaries. The ship designer is complex, detailed, and rewarding, letting you tinker with hulls, turrets, armor, funnels, and weight distribution in ways that actually affect combat performance. For anyone who gets a thrill imagining themselves as a naval genius, this game scratches that itch beautifully. Unfortunately, the campaign that ties it all together never quite feels finished, even in its “final” release state. The economy is a constant uphill battle. Your budget — supposedly tied to your nation’s GDP — almost never grows in a meaningful way. In practice, progress depends on random events rather than strategic management. You’re constantly scraping by, running deficits just to stay competitive, and the game punishes you for it. Go bankrupt and you’ll get bailed out, but at the cost of your nation’s GDP and a scolding reminder that you did it wrong. Meanwhile, the AI seems to play by a completely different set of rules. It never suffers from budget problems, fielding massive fleets and advanced technologies well beyond its means. You’ll get notifications of rival admirals being fired for incompetence, but they’ll still be back next turn with a stronger navy. If you suffer the same fate, it’s game over. The AI can lose entire wars and governments, but as long as it still controls one port, it never truly loses. The game’s endless barrage of random events doesn’t help. Most of them feel irrelevant or punishing — decisions that boil down to “how much money or prestige do you want to lose today?” Rarely do these choices benefit the player, and they break up the flow of gameplay without adding meaningful depth. Diplomacy is, bluntly, a joke. Trying to improve relations is like rolling dice in a smoky bar — the results are random, arbitrary, and often illogical. Sometimes nations warm up to you, sometimes they’re insulted by your generosity. Prestige — another meter you can lose the game from — constantly hangs over your head like a guillotine. The result is a diplomacy system that feels punitive rather than strategic. Then there’s the war itself. Despite being “the Admiral,” you have little actual control over the wars you fight. You can design the ships, but you can’t influence when, where, or how battles occur. Land combat happens off-screen with a progress bar, and naval bombardment — something you’d assume would matter — seems to have no effect at all. Even peace negotiations are bizarre: you might crush an enemy fleet, only for them to refuse to cede territory despite total defeat. The campaign map adds its own frustrations. It scrolls like it’s dragging an anchor, with sluggish movement and awkward UI placement. Naval invasions are guesswork — you don’t know how much tonnage you need until it’s too late, and the camera’s “springy” edge behavior makes navigating the map a chore. The International Date Line splits the map in half, but instead of looping naturally, you have to scroll all the way around just to reach the other side. It’s tedious, clunky, and baffling. The tutorials, while extensive, feel outdated and occasionally broken. Some missions can’t even be completed due to changes in stats and game mechanics since their creation. While learning to build and fight doesn’t require them, the tutorials’ neglected state reflects the same rough edges seen throughout the campaign. There’s so much potential here. The ship designer and combat engine are genuinely impressive — few games capture the majesty and brutality of naval warfare this well. But the campaign layer meant to give all that context feels like it’s constantly working against you. Between the broken economy, rule-breaking AI, shallow diplomacy, and a UI that fights for your attention, Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts feels like a brilliant prototype trapped in development hell. Score: 6/10 – A naval dream weighed down by its own bureaucracy.

This game wasn't cheap and for it to be abandoned by the game developers is borderline criminal. I believe that partial refunds should be issued. The game was nowhere near finished when the final update was released.

To put it simply: this game's goals were not reached by its development team, and it was abandoned in a state that is completely unacceptable. It is a buggy, broken, poorly put together game. Do not support this game with your money, and do not support this terrible game development studio. They are not only extremely incompetent when it comes to making games, they are also absolutely useless when it comes to communication with their player base. If you're still interested after all of that, be prepared for a buggy game with a terrible UI and a borderline useless AI to fight against. You will be bored with it after ten hours.

DO NOT BUY THIS Not beacuse the game is bad, but beacuse the publishers fired the developers once they refused to milk the game. ♥♥♥♥ you game labs, hope you go bankrupt.

This game is abandoned by its developer. Its not done and not worth buying.

Game has been abandoned. I do enjoy the game, don't get me wrong. It's fun and has appeal. But the entire Dev team was fired by the publisher and the game is since no longer worked on

Dev team was fired by the publisher, hard stop to development. This was always a tough title to enjoy, but there's not a lot of naval combat games that try to take this level of scope on. If you play with the Dreadnought Improvement Project mod, it improves on a lot of the systems... but under the hood many of these systems are kind of broken at the base level where modders can't touch. If you just want to play some random battles - it can be fun If you play with the above mod, you can find some level of fun in a campaign But overall this is abadonware that you should avoid buying, and that really sucks