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 run (38 if you count the easy level alternatives). While falling flat as a puzzle game The Ultra Code's strategy elements also underwhelm. Supposedly you are gathering information to win a war, so you spend that information on various military operations which contribute to a score counter that determines the outcome of the war. The operation mechanic has the potential to reward the player and act as a driving gameplay force. Sadly the developers chose not to capitalize on this potential. Instead the strategy elements act as both a score sink and an obstacle to the player, as a player could easily waste their precious intel on the wrong operations, but no matter what operations a player chooses, the only real result is the player seeing one of two slide-shows at the end of the game. This mechanic baffles the mind with how shallow it is, contributing nothing other than a meta-puzzle whose only challenge lies in the fact that during the first playthrough the player is unaware of all the pieces. Thus as a game of strategy this game fails, as a game of puzzles this game also fails.

Despite The Ultra Code being set in Bletchley Park's Hut 8, where Alan Turing and the other code breakers cracked enigma codes, this game has nothing at all to do with cryptography. Instead the puzzles are based on constructing Deterministic Finite Automata, which is a rather dry selection from your average Computer Science degree program. There is a plain disconnect here, and no matter how you frame it, the pairing of actual game mechanics with the very real historical setting, muddies the water and will undoubtably confuse your average player about cryptography and the nature of Turing et al.'s work.


Beyond the confusion of and caused by this game, there are many baffling design choices. As previously stated, there is no solution saving, no editing, no selecting a desired puzzle in the campaign. There is also no way to skip tutorials, skip cutscenes, view sample inputs, etc. Worst of all, during gameplay, there is a button that is labeled EXIT, one might assume that this would take you back to the main menu: instead, this button gives up on the current level and forfeits any potential intel earned. Yes the game tells you that this is going to happen, however when the rest of the game is purely mouse driven there is no reason for the button to return to the main menu to be ESC on your keyboard. At no other point will you touch the keyboard during this game. In only a moment's absentmindedness, one can easily accidentally lose a level, mess up an entire campaign then have to play through the entire tutorial, watch all the unskippable cutscenes, then play up to 20 levels to get back to where you were. This is bad design.

On a side node, on Mac OS, I had to disable the Steam Overlay because the game would open it every 3 seconds, which I find to be unacceptable.


You may then be asking yourself, "Why did this guy get every achievement and write a complete guide (at time of writing the only community guide) on how to beat every puzzle and max out the operations score if he dislikes the game so much?"
I will answer your question with another question, "Who else was going to?" This game has been on the market of 7 months, and had no guides, and I felt that someone had to make this resource for others.
So I took the time to finish this game, to reload levels time and time again so that I could screenshot solutions and even find the optimal choice selection to win the game and get all of its achievements.

During this process I did not have fun. I did it more out of a sense of duty to the genre. Once I post this review I do not think I will look at this game again. I would not recommend it, as I feel that this was a serious let down compared to what it could have been.

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 run (38 if you count the easy level alternatives). While falling flat as a puzzle game The Ultra Code's strategy elements also underwhelm. Supposedly you are gathering information to win a war, so you spend that information on various military operations which contribute to a score counter that determines the outcome of the war. The operation mechanic has the potential to reward the player and act as a driving gameplay force. Sadly the developers chose not to capitalize on this potential. Instead the strategy elements act as both a score sink and an obstacle to the player, as a player could easily waste their precious intel on the wrong operations, but no matter what operations a player chooses, the only real result is the player seeing one of two slide-shows at the end of the game. This mechanic baffles the mind with how shallow it is, contributing nothing other than a meta-puzzle whose only challenge lies in the fact that during the first playthrough the player is unaware of all the pieces. Thus as a game of strategy this game fails, as a game of puzzles this game also fails. Despite The Ultra Code being set in Bletchley Park's Hut 8, where Alan Turing and the other code breakers cracked enigma codes, this game has nothing at all to do with cryptography. Instead the puzzles are based on constructing Deterministic Finite Automata, which is a rather dry selection from your average Computer Science degree program. There is a plain disconnect here, and no matter how you frame it, the pairing of actual game mechanics with the very real historical setting, muddies the water and will undoubtably confuse your average player about cryptography and the nature of Turing et al.'s work. Beyond the confusion of and caused by this game, there are many baffling design choices. As previously stated, there is no solution saving, no editing, no selecting a desired puzzle in the campaign. There is also no way to skip tutorials, skip cutscenes, view sample inputs, etc. Worst of all, during gameplay, there is a button that is labeled EXIT, one might assume that this would take you back to the main menu: instead, this button gives up on the current level and forfeits any potential intel earned. Yes the game tells you that this is going to happen, however when the rest of the game is purely mouse driven there is no reason for the button to return to the main menu to be ESC on your keyboard. At no other point will you touch the keyboard during this game. In only a moment's absentmindedness, one can easily accidentally lose a level, mess up an entire campaign then have to play through the entire tutorial, watch all the unskippable cutscenes, then play up to 20 levels to get back to where you were. This is bad design. On a side node, on Mac OS, I had to disable the Steam Overlay because the game would open it every 3 seconds, which I find to be unacceptable. You may then be asking yourself, "Why did this guy get every achievement and write a complete guide (at time of writing the only community guide) on how to beat every puzzle and max out the operations score if he dislikes the game so much?" I will answer your question with another question, "Who else was going to?" This game has been on the market of 7 months, and had no guides, and I felt that someone had to make this resource for others. So I took the time to finish this game, to reload levels time and time again so that I could screenshot solutions and even find the optimal choice selection to win the game and get all of its achievements. During this process I did not have fun. I did it more out of a sense of duty to the genre. Once I post this review I do not think I will look at this game again. I would not recommend it, as I feel that this was a serious let down compared to what it could have been.