By Osaze Okungbowa

Ultimate General: Civil War was my first experience with a real-time strategy game. I usually play first person shooter games, so fighting a battle via commands instead of shooting was a leap of faith that I thought I was ready for. Turns out I was heavily under-prepared. In this game, you’re given a lot of choices. The default choice you must answer no matter which game mode you play is whether you fight for the Confederacy or the Union. If you join the Union, you face the Confederacy and vice versa.

When I first loaded the game, I was given three options: Campaign, Battle, and Custom Battle. I chose the Campaign because I didn’t see a tutorial button, and usually the that mode teaches you how to play the game. I was wrong. I had to become the general: choosing my education level, my role in the Mexican-American War, my further career. Then, I was given the objective, and placed on a dirt path and told to command my troops. I accidentally speed ran myself to the defeat screen, as I would never back down from any rebel units.

The controls are pretty basic and easy to understand: you click on a unit of soldiers and drag an arrow to where you want them to go; the easy control mechanic works in tandem with the pause button as you can still command soldiers while the battle isn’t going forward. They’re also a bunch of minor commands, like dismount, hold fire, fallback, and hold position. The utilization of these commands reflects your mindset on the battlefield. At first, I ignored them because I wanted constant action. The game gave me sad carnage along with multiple crushing defeats. After five campaign losses, I finally started experimenting. Utilizing the hold fire feature, I snuck my units behind 200 Confederate rebels and then I dropped the full force of my army, the Union, on them. Needless to say, I wiped all 200 soldiers out, while sustaining minimal casualties.

Each map I played felt like a puzzle, designed in its own unique way. Whenever I was on the verge of losing, I would just pause the battle and slowly rotate the camera around the map; this slowed down my own breathing and allowed me to just think.

I truly adore the graphics and maps. One look at the serene towns, forests, rivers, and farmland communicates to me what my soldiers are fighting for and why I need to give them justice by being the best commander I can be.

In war, music is only played in times of victory and defeat. Aside from the main menu, this game respects that logic by only implementing a soundtrack during the dialogue screens after you win or during the defeat screen after you lose. Outside of combat you will only hear drums, marching, and horse hooves hitting the battlefield, but when your army confronts the enemy’s army the peaceful rhythmic marching and drumming erupts into shouting, cannon firing, and gun firing. If both armies come close enough, an epic melee brawl will begin – with realistic sword clashing sound effects. Many gamers, including me, like to play with no volume, but in this game that’s a death sentence. When I played with no volume, the enemy would rain fire on my soldiers without me even noticing. But when my sound was on, the gun firing and shouting made me fully alert to every single encounter that happened on the map.

I’ve always struggled with finding the balance between offense and defense. When I began playing the campaign, I was an action-hungry player on a losing streak. The AI enemies adapted and would constantly flank me when I pursued Confederate soldiers. I had to then learn to pacify myself in order to gain land and keep my soldiers. But the game maker’s code adapted again and started sending huge pushes at me, knowing I would fall back to preserve my soldiers lives. This would leave me to lose via low supplies. After each loss my hands would instinctively press play again no matter how mentally worn out I was. It was like a surge of gambling fever except for gaming: if I wasn’t playing I was running battle simulations in my head and brainstorming ways to outmaneuver the other troops.

Campaign mode is a marathon mode that can go on for hours, so if you want a quick thirty minutes to an hour battle, historical battles and custom battles are for you. Historical battle is similar to campaign, except it features only one battle at a time with most of the setup done for you. Custom battle gives you the freedom to create historical “What If” scenarios: you’re given control over the weapon types, map, and army structure. Personally, I prefer the  campaign options because I’ve always loved roleplaying in stories, even if I know how they end, and campaign mode allows me to save data so I could always just pick up from where I left off.

Civil War’s hidden potential can truly manifest itself when you play with other people. There’s no multiplayer mode, unfortunately. However, the feeling you get when you sit down with your peers and discuss each move and its respective outcome is unmatched. I can only describe it as like being given a seat on a war council, where soldiers’ lives are at risk. Whenever I played this game in our NYVGCC class, I would group up with a few of my classmates and spend several minutes debating on the best moves to make, and only once did we all unanimously agree to execute a plan.

Ultimate General: Civil War will make your brain run laps, as you try to foresee all possible outcomes. Beyond that, Civil War will pull on your heart strings because watching a unit you’ve taken care of for a prolonged time get decimated is a different type of pain. However, you must still carry on your duties as a general and never let emotion cloud your judgement. Your heart isn’t what’s keeping your soldiers alive, your brain is.

Hurry up, General, your soldiers await your commands!

Osaze Okungbowa is a senior at the Bronx’s Lab School of Finance and Technology, where NYVGCC teaches its journalism classes. Osaze won our Rockstar Scholarship and will soon be attending Cornell University.

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