Recent reviews by 1nspektr

War Thunder is the quintessential competitive team-based mmo. The only way to enjoy the game once the newness wears off is by lowering your expectations over and over, until you no longer really care about getting that top tier tank/plane that caught your eye.

The unforgiving nature of this game draws out your sweatiest, most competitive self and either rewards you or breaks you. Every time you dive on a plane, every time you shoot at a tank, every time a red (by default) name appears on the horizon, you either end up seeing a "target destroyed" message (satisfying), or you die and get instantly pulled out of the action (frustrating), usually via a jarring explosion.

To the new player, this game will either be a short, frustrating experience, or it will become their life for a while. The early gameplay in every mode is intense and fast-paced, the tanks have light armor and the planes are relatively slow, so skill is not a big requirement. A lot of veteran players play at low ranks (up to mid/late WW2 vehicles) because the gameplay style is much more close-quarters oriented and tank armor takes a much more active role in defense than the high tiers where the high velocity cannons mounted on high mobility vehicles pretty much make every encounter a competition to see who hits the other first.

The problems start arising when a new player has played a while and has gotten used to queuing and re-queuing back to back. At this point, the player likely has become good enough to know when they make mistakes (mostly positioning and aiming) or when they encounter a design flaw (way less than most players would lead you to believe), so when they die, they know how they could have gotten a kill instead and this results in frustration that builds up with every death. Because the player is still playing at the same pace as when they started (back to back without breaks, chasing dopamine), the frustration builds up quickly. Over time, this frustration with simple mistakes becomes too much and the player eventually quits and takes a break from the game (i'm pretty sure every player past like 1000 hours has taken multiple breaks from this game).

Quitting War Thunder is never really permanent for some players though. If you look through r/Warthunder you will see a lot of people mention the fact that they want to quit but can't because "there aren't any other games like it" (the most common excuse). I would agree with that claim at the moment, but there are a number of indie devs working on games in the vehicle combat sim niche (Gunner, HEAT, PC! has received the most love and attention out of the handful of indie tank sims I have seen) at the moment.

However, I don't think War Thunder should be treated as something to be "quit" because the problems, though present, don't take away as much from the gameplay as the average player would believe at the end of their daily gaming session. The key is to take a break from the game or at least from the vehicle you're grinding when the frustration begins building. At least, that's how I've learned to cope with getting gaijin'd or suffering a skill issue. I still don't recommend this game though because if you let it, it WILL suck you in like a whirlpool and violently drag you to the bottom where you will learn to fight the current or continue suffering.

TL;DR
Use responsibly.

I pretty much bought a VR headset to play this game and it was definitely worth the purchase

It has many similarities to Warband with only a few of the issues. It is definitely worth the 40 bucks to me.

It's pretty fun, although the DLC is a bit expensive for a peasant like me.