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Recommended
12.5 hrs last two weeks / 1,007.3 hrs on record (805.7 hrs at review time)
Posted: 25 Sep, 2024 @ 12:42pm
Updated: 20 Apr @ 5:17am

I like this game and would recommend it, but it's not for everybody. This review is primarily about ground battles because that's mostly what I play.
Things I like:
  • Weapons and armor are simulated in detail. You're not just trying to shoot someone until their HP bar runs out and the game decides you win; you need to knock out the enemy's crew. You need to understand the capability of your vehicle and the vulnerabilities of your opponents to know where to shoot, otherwise you're just going to bounce off and get one-shot in return.
  • Different components of tanks are simulated, and hitting them will disable those parts. Maybe you can't kill the enemy in front of you, but a well-placed shot could take out their barrel allowing you to escape.
  • Putting together your game knowledge to make a difficult kill feels amazing when it goes right.
  • Gaijin is continually adding things to the game and fixing bugs. They also have fairly robust tools for reporting cheaters, and frequently do ban waves. You can watch match recordings from the server's perspective and if you report people from there, Gaijin manually reviews the footage to make a determination.
  • You can play completely for free.

Things I don't like:
  • If you don't want to spend any money, you're could be playing for months before reaching modern vehicles. I personally really enjoy lower tier stuff, but Gaijin markets this game by showing jets and modern tanks; if you're only interested in new stuff it's going to be a slog.
  • More generally, this game is very grindy. You start with the oldest/weakest vehicles for each nation, and playing lineups of those vehicles gives you research points to unlock the next vehicle down each tech tree for that combination of nation and vehicle type. If you're just playing to grind, you're going to burn out pretty quick.
  • Gaijin kindly offers players the opportunity to "skip" this grind by buying individual high-tier jets, tanks, and ships. These can be as expensive as $80 each, insanely overpriced. I HIGHLY recommend not buying one of these as a way into the game. Doing so will allow you to research more vehicles, but you still have to start from the very beginning to unlock things in order. If you decide to buy one of these, I regret to inform you...
  • There's no skill-based matchmaking. The only thing that determines who you're fighting is the "battle rating" of the vehicles they currently have equipped. That means if you're jumping into a 10.0 BR match as a new player with a newly-purchased premium, the people you're facing will either have done the same thing, or have played for hundreds of hours to unlock vehicles themselves. That latter group will eat you alive. They'll be so much better than you, so much more experienced, that you're probably not even going to learn from your mistakes when you die. You're going to feel like a toddler in an MMA fight. Again, please don't buy premiums to jump ahead.
  • People who buy premium vehicles as described above usually only have the one vehicle. After you use up the reinforcements they come with, you'll only be able to spawn once per game. People usually bring a full lineup of ~5 vehicles. Given that you're a newbie, you're going to die early in each fight and have to jump out to join another. This is not only frustrating for you, but also for your team, who is now instantly down one player. I'm told this is a huge problem at high tier, but I don't play that high.
  • The gamemodes haven't been changed much since the very beginning. Ground is always capture-the-point. Sometimes there's only one point instead of three, and sometimes it's also a deathmatch where the first team to 60 kills wins, but it's all simplistic and can get old.
  • I generally like the maps, but there are some big problems. Some maps let you shoot almost directly from spawn-to-spawn which is not fun. Many maps make it easy to camp the enemy spawn. They do give you a short window of spawn protection, and honestly if the enemy team has your spawn locked down your team has already lost, but it's annoying.
    Gaijin has tried to fix some map issues not by modifying the maps, but by reducing vehicle traction. It's very frustrating to not be able to climb up a hill just because they say so. I do understand that map design is hard, but there are ways to fix these things that don't feel like punishments for playing a way they don't want you to.
  • Gaijin sometimes makes pretty arbitrary choices for how vehicles will behave and require complainers to submit specific documents proving the vehicles don't act that way. That's less of a problem for old stuff, but new vehicles don't have declassified documents available that provide that information. Sometimes they'll use very borderline complaints as an excuse to change something for balance reasons while pretending it's about accuracy.
  • They release a lot of updates and claim to fix a lot of bugs, but often the bugs won't be actually fixed. Bug reports can sit waiting for years sometimes before they're addressed. Their "fixes" often end up breaking other things somehow too. Vehicles not making sound is a frequent complaint that they claim to have fixed recently, hopefully that's so. There was a "bug" until recently that tanks in realistic ground battles sometimes just wouldn't render in your game even if you looked directly at them; this turned out to be because the game judged your crew wasn't skilled enough to see them so far away. They've changed this, thank god.
  • Speaking of crew skill: there are a few actual pay-to-win mechanics here, crew skill being chief among them. You need to maintain different "crews", basically vehicle equip slots, for each nation. Using a crew in battle will earn you crew XP, which you can use to upgrade them. A fully upgraded crew can sometimes reload the same tank in half the time it would take an unupgraded crew. This is annoying, but the problem is you can pay real money to buy crew XP. It's ludicrously expensive, but it allows you to pay real money to just be legitimately better than other players. It's best to use the XP you earn judiciously and ignore the possibilities here.
  • You can pay a few dollars to buy bushes to put on your tank, obscuring them and their weak points. Some maniacs will cover themselves entirely with bushes, making it impossible to know what they are or where to shoot them. These people are generally looked down upon, and it's not as big a problem as crew skill, but I don't think it should be in the game.
  • There are MANY premium vehicles available for purchase for real money, not just at high tier. These are usually generally well balanced, I would say, but some are extremely powerful. There are also three real-money stores for vehicles: The Gaijin store, where you just pay cash, the in-game tech tree, where you pay golden eagles (premium currency), and the Gaijin Marketplace, where you can buy some vehicles from other players using "Gaijin Coin", which is another premium currency.
  • Maybe the biggest problem of all: This game has a sheer skill cliff, and it tells you almost nothing. It's very common for players to feel like they're getting killed out of nowhere, or their attacks aren't doing anything, or just not knowing the basics of how to play, and it's because the game doesn't teach you any of it. Beyond learning from experience, be prepared to watch a bunch of "top war thunder tips" videos on youtube. You need to know:
    1. Types of ammo, their penetration and effects
    2. Weak points in the armor of every tank
    3. Crew and ammo locations in enemy tanks, as well as where ammo is removed first if they don't take a full load
    4. Map layouts, good spots to defend or look for enemies[/oslit]
    5. [/list]I play a lot of this game, and I like it, but there are lots of problems. My suggestion is to play it if you're capable of stopping when you get frustrated.
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