So Is Ultimate General: American Revolution Any Good?

It’s never going to be finished like you’d want. Ultimate General: American Revolution marks the end of the line for the small wargame studio built around former Total War modder Nick “DarthMod” Thomadis. They had an incredibly promising debut with Ultimate General: Gettysburg, still one of the most beautiful and replayable casual wargames ever made, but never went back to the “single battle” style of wargame and pursued larger, theoretically more replayable dynamic campaigns. American Revolution was far and away the most ambitious attempt on these lines yet, and perhaps that ambition played a role in the fact that Thomadis and other senior leadership left the studio and wrapped up work on American Revolution after its hastened exit from Early Access on Steam. 

As you might expect, Steam reviews are deeply negative, both from players who feel ripped-off by the semi-unfinished state of the game and from those who think the series’ developers were let down by their publisher. Those reviews might be overly harsh: Ultimate General: American Revolution is good enough to be heartbreaking, an enormously fun and flawed toy that suggests Game-Labs was improbably on the right track.