The Ultra Code

Too litle of a game to justify any cost. I finished this game in less than 1,5 hours and didn't fail a single time. I like the idea which is why I bought the game, but at this point it's not value for money. It needs more challenging puzzles and a longer campaign.

Cool little puzzle/logic game. You pretty much take an input stream of 0's and 1's and direct them around to meet certain criteria for each level. Voice acting is good, puzzles are a bit on the easy side but some of the later ones (if you choose the hard ones) can take a little time to work out. The UI is mostly ok, but can get a little crowded when you have 10 nodes all connecting and cross connecting to each other. My main complaints would be that the game is somewhat short (although not too bad given the price), and that you have to play through the game again and intentionally lose in order to unlock all the achievements D: If you like easy/medium puzzle logic games with some historical flavor, this is worth $6.

CAUTION: This game is only a really simple Deterministic Finite Automata simulator, and it has nothing to do with the actual Enigma machines or any code breaking, which I was led to believe by the description. On top of that, we get unskippable history lessons, which are completely irrelevant to the tasks that we solve. Solving tasks gives you "intel" points, which can be spent on progressing various "operations". There's a gotcha with that: you can't win all operations even by solving all the hard tasks and never spending intel on buying bulbs. At some point, you just need to start banking intel for the Overlord operation and skip other operations, otherwise Nazis will win the war. The puzzles are mostly OK, but most of them is quite easy once you get a feel of how DFA's work. The graphics are ugly and really dated (early 2000's?), but you can see that on the screenshots. There's a lot of missing functionality (debugging, auto-connecting missing links, tagging the bulbs with some mea...

I'm 100% on board with games like this, and the game's narrative provided a somewhat rich, albeit truncated, history of the Bletchley Park code breakers... However, The game mechanics had no relation to Enigma ciphers whatsoever, and provided such a trivial challenge to fans of coding/design games... I was able to easily complete all paths of the game and collect all achievements in a single evening. Most disappointing.

I will preface this review with the following statement: The Ultra Code has problems, it is a deeply flawed game. That being said, The Ultra Code has decent voice acting, an interesting premise, and some satisfying visual feedback. Unfortunately, the game is confused about what it wants to be, and confuses the casual audience in its presentation of historical events. On the first count, the game seems to be unsure as to whether it should be a programming/electromechanical puzzle game or whether it should be a strategy game where the player makes meaningful decisions to win a war. The Ultra Code struggles to meet the standard set by other games in the programming/electromechanical puzzle genre; there is no real chance to learn and optimize your work, there are no metrics about your solution, and in fact you can't save, edit, or even view your work after you complete a puzzle. From a purely mechanical perspective the puzzles never really change, no mechanics change over the 20 level r...

Not actually a codebreaking game, and not being able to skip the "briefings" was a PITA. Especially since I ended up restarting twice because I didn't have enough bulbs for the next codes or intel to buy them, not realizing I would always start with the minimum amount. It would have been nice to have that game mechanic communicated in the tutorial levels.

The game seems a pretty nice little puzzle although fairly easy. And it runs on Linux! It could use some UI work though. I couldn't find a button to reply the test that failed, it kind of makes you build everything and never watch the tests. I accidentally skipped a puzzle halfway through because I wanted to quit the game for a bit, that's not what I thought the exit button will do. Buying operation after each completed puzzle is kind of pointless, why would I spend points now instead of waiting and buying it when I have all of them?

Well voice acted. Seemingly simple but challenging coding mechanics and easy functioning UI. Overall a good game for a casual coding experience.

This game is [b]by no means challenging[/b] to anyone who knows themself to understand finite state machines. I found myself having to properly debug my solution (on the more difficult branch the game offers) only once. This does not mean the game is of poor quality. It's still thoroughly enjoyable and would probably serve as a great educational tool to introduce people to the subject practically. In fact, I think it's highly probable that that's what the developers were trying to achieve, and at that they have certainly succeeded. The game is rather short, but its length is far from unreasonable for the price. If it isn't obvious, the Enigma cipher and Bletchley park are merely a theme. A very well-executed theme, make no mistake, but the gameplay - aside from the letters and films about the role the Bletchley codebreakers served in the war - is in no way pertinent. The voice acting is very good (though not perfect) and the music excellently complements the theme. Having read oth...

If you've ever seen a finite automaton before, this is beyond trivial—(and it's therefore overpriced for what it is.) But I can see this serving as a good introduction to the topic, and hope they continue to add more content. Two or three-tape Turing Machines are the obvious place to go next! Or just like interesting finite languages, like palindromes of length k.