War Thunder

Before I dig deeper into all the goods and the bads of this game, let me first warn the newcomers that this game is falsely advertised: the modern jets, choppers, tanks and ships that you see in the trailers - you don't get to play them right away. No, no. There are no entry points for the modern vehicles in the "tech tree". You need to start with the Spanish Civil War era biplanes and armored vehicles that only barely resemble tanks, and then work your way up from there. It will take you 2 to 3 months of dedicated gaming, if you're any good, to get to your first jet. The only way to get an advanced vehicle before time is to pay 30 to 60 dollars for one of the "premium vehicles", but then it ceases to be a free-to-play thing, which was also a part of the advertisement. So, one way or another, they're lying to you .

If you're a history or a warfare enthusiast, this game will be a lackluster experience or even annoy the hell out of you. I should know. The vehicles and the locations are utilized in an ahistorical fashion. Let's just call it alternative history or even steampunk. Tightly intertwined with what you'd normally expect, there are all kinds of bizarre scenarios: jets against props; boats against destroyers; Brits and Germans against Yanks and Japs; Russian planes against Italian planes over Midway; Swedish tanks against Israeli tanks in Vietnam... stuff like that. The military tactics is rudimentary: it's basically just point and shoot. There are sometimes points to be captured on the map, but they serve no meaningful purpose in a strategical way. They're just randomly placed there and are not even critical for winning the round. The teams are not assembled uniformly, because the matchmaker allows any faction and any vehicle, as long as it meets the required "battle rating" level.

Now a bit about the "good" in the game. The game is not "pay to win". I've held a paid subscription for a time and noticed no advantage over other players because of that. All you get is slightly larger rewards after the match and a slightly faster advancement through the "tech tree". The physics model is really, really good. Whether you're operating aircraft, ground vehicles or vessels, the feeling will be organic and natural. You won't even need specialised equipment to get a good experience: a simple mouse and keyboard will do just nicely. The vehicles are plentiful and are modeled in great detail. Really nice to look at. The overall shading is also very lovely - the lighting, the sky, the sea, the clouds and the special effects are very cinematic and exciting. The maps are huge and detailed. However, they are generally not pretty at all. And here's where the bad starts.

The vast majority of maps are well behind what's nowadays considered the standard quality for texturing and populating the scenery. There is an overwhelmingly pedestrian feel about most of them and some are just an eyesore, with jarring contrasts or unnatural shades of brown, gray and orange, and with dull multiplications of the same tree and the same house across the range. What becomes especially apparent in the ground mode are the numerous glitches in the scenery, such as flickering walls, disappearing and reappearing foliage and vehicles, buildings submerged below the water level (and I'm not even talking about the "Drowned City" map which is a special case of ugly) and so on. I've never played another game that's unpolished like that. For this game to still be unpolished, after 8 years of existence and constant updates, is a crime. The World of Tanks and The World of Warships are running circles around War Thunder in that regard.

The gameplay is also unpolished and unbalanced, to the point where one wonders whether the developers understand their own game anymore. New vehicles keep getting churned out all the time, without being tested and tweaked properly, which makes the matches increasingly uneven and leaves many players frustrated. To make matters worse, there are many cheaters and exploiters that ruin the game for everyone. They're most obvious in the tank mode, shooting you through acres of bushes across the whole map with ungodly precision. The developers don't like to admit the cheating issue, they sometimes even supress the talks of it in the official forums. But they're also banning hundreds of accounts over cheating on a monthly basis. So there is clearly a lot of that going on. If you try to lash out at a cheater during the game via the game chat and tell him what you think of his "skill", you're the one risking a ban. Because, despite violence being the theme of the game, crude language is not well tolerated, not even in the interface itself, as a matter of fact. As an example, the game doesn't inform you that your pilot is killed, he's "knocked unconscious". You know, by a projectile. So, there's that, but the sanitization goes beyond the language. There's no blood and gore, either, and all the Swastikas from all the WWII German vehicles are replaced with the Iron Crosses. You can purchase a decal that says "For Stalin", though. Make of that what you will, to me it's yet another proof of how political correctness is always drenched in hypocrisy.

The "tech tree" and the infamous "grind" are another huge problem in the game. There's a lot of vehicles, but it takes a lot of time to get them: hours for the early vehicles and even weeks for the more modern era jets and tanks. Within every vehicle there's yet another "tech tree". That's right. You have to "research", or "grind", the same parts all over again for every new vehicle to be able to upgrade it to a full battle order. Until you do, you will participate in the matches with the rump version of the vehicle and get killed a lot. That's probably the most ridiculous aspect of War Thunder. Of course, if you pay the money you can speed up the process, but it would cost you up to 40 dollars per single vehicle, and there's hundreds of them, so good luck with that. In addition, there are dozens of other things you can buy in the in-game "market", such as various camouflages, colour schemes, props and decals, or so-called "rare vehicles" that are subjected to artificial scarcity, which can drive the price easily up to 300 dollars, in some cases 1000 dollars, per unit. There's only one letter of difference between "micropayment" and "macropayment"... but a whole lot of money. I can't think of any reason why anyone would waste potentially thousands of dollars on a single game, but apparently some players do. Then again, there are people wasting millions on the NFTs these days. Here you at least get "something" for your buck, if that's any consolation. To me it's a scam, but that's ultimately for the Hungarian authorities to decide. The game developer is based there. They used to be located in Russia, but they chose to betray and abandon the Motherland for the Western funny-money.

To conclude, I'll explain the title of my review. War Thunder started its life as a WW2 era combat flight simulator. Over time it expanded into the modern aviation era. But it also expanded into nations, or factions, that were not a meaningful part of the WW2 conflict. It also expanded into other modes of warfare - ground and naval. It's made free to play to attract the broadest swath of players possible. All that ambition has taken the toll on the gameplay and overall experience. The game is buggy, the players are frustrated, and the grind and the shady in-game payment schemes make the developers look arrogant, greedy and stupid. Which they probably are. Needless to say the atmosphere in the War Thunder community is rather dour and pessimistic because all of that, and there's a feeling that the game could have been so much better if it wasn't stifled by all these issues. But it is still addictive even the way it is. You get addicted on the physics engine and on the false sense of achievement provided by a successful "grind". If you are prepared to lose countless hours, even years on this, go ahead. You'll certainly regret it. You'll, unfortunately, also love it.

It's really like a bad marriage. This review is my personal filing for divorce.

I have over 10K battles invested in this game. And throughout my experiences I can tell you that the Russian tanks are heavily favored. Reason for that is they get more favorable shots they do penetrations and some extreme areas where the shots normally don't penetrate. And they can kill tanks with glancing blows no other country can do that in the game. Also the map of extremes where you can just see everybody on AB battles takes all of the Tactical and strategic fun out of the game. Spotting somebody from a thousand meters away that's not even in your line of sight makes the game too hard. You can't set to jump anybody you can't set up an ambush because, your tank can be spotted through walls through buildings through anything however Russian tanks don't get spotted very easily another Dynamic which is heavily favored I don't know if it's because it's a russian-made game or what it is exactly. I know it sounds like I'm complaining I'm not I have played the game with all countries and all fairness. And I understand the Dynamics for example British early tanks do not have explosive rounds until rank maybe two or three where they start to get them. Russian tanks have extreme load times and poor accuracy but can kill with glancing blows and penetrate in the damnedest areas. The Germans as Superior as they are offensively they have low survivability when hit. And for some reason their parties seem to take longer to recover. As far as the realistic battles go, it's another level of extremes it's a steep learning curve and it's also very unforgiving. The biggest problem with the game would be the cross platform issue. You have guys who play on mouse and keyboard and have severe advantages when it comes to aiming over console players. The simple fact that on Council you have a constantly disappearing reticle when it Blends into the backgrounds it doesn't give you Fair Vantage of sight. The reticle appears and disappears constantly. I thought it was a leveling up issue but now that I have my cruise into the levels of seventies and '80s with vision and targeting maxed out the problem still exists. Geishing has shifted from making a quality war game to making more of a money maker and is taking a lot of the quality out of the game by doing so. Maybe you'll feel differently but that's just my opinion.

First of all, this is not me just mindlessly review bombing this game... This is me after multiple years of keeping up with all this just finally being sick of Gaijins absolutely ridiculous design of the ingame economy and their shocking inability to simply take feedback from its community and at least try to implement suggested changes into the game.

1. Don't be fooled by the game calling itself "free to play". By doing so, Gaijin (the Developer) is just hiding behind the technicality of you being able to download and launch Warthunder and queue for games without having to pay anything. And tbh for the first couple of hours, you might actually enjoy the game. Savor that feeling because it won't last very long.

After unlocking the first couple of vehicles you will have to face the reality that progressing in this game and unlocking even more vehicles requires UN-REAL amounts of grind, making the game feel very repetitive, unrewarding and just plain boring. But of course you can mitigate all this by paying up.

Unfortunatly the truth is that without paying up you wont be unlocking anything in the higher tiers any time soon, because the the free vehicles (as confirmed by Gaijin themselves) are desinged in such a way, as to "earn" you a net loss of ingame currency, required to pay primarily for new vehicles (but also lots of other bs, that makes it harder to progress in the game, like repair cost, modifications costs, crew training, crew upgrades, rearmament cost etc.). This effectively forces you to artificially increase your income by buying a premium account or premium vehicles (preferrably both) if you really want to progress in the game instead of regressing (and regretting lol).

There is nothing wrong with this kind of system in principle. I absolutly recognise that the developer has to make some profits as well. But its all about balancing that system is such a specific way, so that it is both profitable for the business, while also being fun for the players, which it ultimatly depends on. Right now the balance is shifted so much towards the business side, that the community is literally calling to boycott the game.

"Free to play"? More like "Free to suffer" and "pay (ridiculous amounts) to actually enjoy"

2. The second thing that I find to be just straight up outrageous is how Gaijin has consistantly been ignoring this kind of feedback and instead kept on worsening this situation with each update, as if testing how much it can get away with, without any serious consequences. It took years of them systematically crippling the players experience for monetary gain for it to finally pile up in that giant ♥♥♥♥ storm we are currently experiencing.

Honestly if you are contempt with limiting yourself to the very early WW2 Planes/Tanks/Ships and just mess around with them a little, then by all means, this game provides. But thats it.

If its variety you want and a progression system that makes you feel like spending time in this game is actually rewarding, and doing so longterm... there is nothing in this game here but disappointment.

I spent abt 420hrs and abt 100 euro in this game and in retrospective, a lot of it just feels wasted.

Given how Gaijin has dealt with this kind of feedback, im very pessimistic when it comes to the future of this game, but I still hope that maybe one day it will become actually player friendly.

In conclusion: Just don't fall for the "free to suffer"-trap. You have been warned.

I hate WarThunder I must confess. I spent too much time on it and still it gives me the wish to crush my computer each time I launch it. Each time I log, I make just two games else I become in a hard anger. The level of toxicity of this game is rare. Why we should make our nerves support this ? It could be a nice game, but there is nothing logical or strategical in this. Just hide and camp. Spawn camping is not rare. Sometimes your shell ricochet as it is not supposed to be and sometimes it one shoot the other tank while the shell arrives at 85° angle. No sense to me, just luck and lay down your brain cause it is useless with this software. Not funy at all.

The concept is amazing. The execution, sucks. Pure Money Grab scheme. All you have to do is play for 5 minutes without putting money towards it and you see, you are just entertainment for the people that will sink alot of money into their pockets. Far from a free game. Plus time is the most important thing to any living being, and they not only waste your time, but money. Strongly recommend to not even try the game. Again, its a great concept, and would be an amazing game, if It wasn't so obvious pay to win. Not many other options out. Maybe one day we can get a Dev that is pure and wants people to just truly enjoy their game without trying to milk them dry like ever other big corporation these days.