War Thunder is a game I love, but also hate with a passion.

It has solid game play, the vehicles and planes are modelled brilliantly and look fantastic. They use damage models rather than a HP meter like in World of Tanks. Which means that when you shoot a tank, if you penetrate the armour you damage the components inside as well as injure the crew.

This means as an example that if you hit the ammunition you can explode a tank outright. If you kill the crew members until their number is less than 2 then the tank is also considered destroyed. However this is where you'll likely face your first issues with the game. The damage system works well enough, but sometimes your shell just doesn't do what it's meant to do. Sometimes you'll experience a 'Ghost shell' which is where it basically disappears without doing anything. Other times you'll hit a tank and penetrate it but everything will get absorbed by the optics. It doesn't take a genius to work out that a piece of bullet proof glass being hit by a tank shell would not absorb the shrapnel.

The game itself has several modes to play, with the focus being the multiplayer options. The single player portion of the game is woefully outdated. Some of it even being unplayable or impossible to complete due to game updates. Gaijin wont fix this however as single player doesn't make them money.

The game also has several nations to choose from; USA, Germany, USSR, Britain, Italy, France, Sweden, Japan, China and the recently added Israel.

Although as far as I understand it, Israel is a premium only nation right now as it requires you to buy a premium tank before you can even start working on the normal tech tree. It's also worth noting that the nations considered 'Minor' like France, Sweden, Italy and China tend to borrow tanks and planes from other nation tech trees, to help fill gaps and to represent lend lease agreements countries had between one another during times of war. Despite this, Minor nations can have large gaps in their tech trees making the grind to the next BR level even more of a pain.

The matchmaking leaves a lot to be desired as does Gaijin's form of balance. They compress the BRs too much which means that WW2 tanks face things from future era's. You'll find yourself regularly uptiered in a match which can make things even more of a pain, and a struggle to be enjoyable.

The game is freemium, which means free to play but with premium options. However Gaijin has balanced the game and it's rewards in such a way that it essentially pushes players to buy premium or premium vehicles. You'll not notice this in the lower tiers, but as you start climbing through the tech trees you'll start to find the costs for repairs and just vehicles themselves increase exponentially on the previous tier.

This also means that as you climb the tiers, having a bad game or even having a mildly successful game will still land you negative Silver Lions due to repair costs, restocking ammunition and so on. Sometimes even having a really good game can still net you negative silver lions if the vehicles you took out had extreme repair costs. Oddly this seems to affect the minor nations the most, as a lot of the better players seem to play them which means overall the vehicles get better statistics so Gaijin 'balances' the vehicles out with higher br's and higher costs.

This makes the game an extreme grind. As an average free player you either slowly hemorrhage Silver lions at higher tiers or buy premium to try to compensate the loses. Although sometimes even having premium wont do this.

I understand that developers need to eat and need cash. But War Thunder was one of if not the most profitable online game within recent memory. And Gaijins game design and money grabbing tactics are predatory, and deliberately make the game a grindy, unfun, buggy mess.

I cannot in good conscience recommend this to anyone to pick up and start playing. Unfortunately it already has it's hooks into me, but I shall not give the snail a single penny.

You can still be a profitable game developer and make money with a good game. Unfortunately the Snail has taken the greedy route and it's drastically affected the quality of their product and what it's user base experiences.