Recent reviews by Faye

It's Hades but bigger and gayer, what more do you want?

This game has a lot going for it, but also a lot of major issues.

Pros: Very detailed and accurate gun models. Gameplay is surprisingly engaging. I found myself trying to optimize ways to strip and reassemble the guns to get the fastest time. It's pretty cool they managed to make gun maintenance fun in a video game.

Cons: A few...

1. Poor performance. Even on a 4670k and R9 295x2 the game will still occasionally crawl to a halt and stutter. This is probably the fault of the Unity engine.
2. Ridiculously long tutorial that still somehow manages to not explain things very well.
3. Incosistent on what parts are grouped into assemblies and which are counted individually. Sometimes you have to remove individual pins/screws, other times you don't.

Now the big problems:

4. Free2Play mechanics. The game is set up so that completing every game mode and getting most/all of the achievements for a gun will give you just barely enough XP to unlock the next gun. You essentially have to grind each gun until you can do it fast enough to get enough XP to progress. They then offer expensive "boosters" and DLC to help you progress faster. No thanks.

5. (Final straw) The shooting range mode is apparently totally broken. I unlocked the 1911 shooting range and after a couple tries managed to complete all of the challenges. However the game did not recognize this at all, and when I returned to the map my >4000 XP had disappeared and I was at 0 XP. This is a ridiculous game-breaking bug and is unacceptable in a final release.

This game is good in concept, but terrible in execution.

War Thunder is a fantastic game, and you should play it. That needs to be said, because it's true. The gameplay and graphics are superb, the controls (especially for mouse and keyboard) are genre-leading, and the sheer number of planes available is staggering.

The game is not perfect, though. It is a F2P MMO, and that means that its economy is based on microtransaction. You will start with WWI era biplanes, and as you level up in each country you unlock new planes, increasing in performance, speed, and power, progressing through the planes of WWII until you reach late-war and post-war jet fighters such as the F-86 Sabre and MiG-15.

Progressing the first few ranks, up to 5-6, is quite easy and can be done in a week or two depending on how much you play. However, past that the grind starts. It takes a long time to get from rank 5 to rank 10; I'm only at 11, so I can't attest to the grind to ranks 17+ (the jet tiers), but I've heard that it is quite lengthy.

You can buy premium planes at ranks higher than your own, but you will be going up against players with hundreds of hours of experience, which makes the experience frustrating. Premium planes, which cost between $2 and $15 generally, are a bit of a mixed bag. Some premium planes are extroardinarily powerful for their rank and unbalance the game unfairly; others are complete wastes of time. It can be frustrating if you don't know which are which.

In addition to your overall "level" (which means nothing), and your rank in each country, you also gain experience for your pilots and for your planes. You get four slots for planes in each country; you can buy two more using free currency, another for pennies in Premium currency; past that it gets expensive. You rank up the pilots in each slot by playing using that slot, and can then upgrade your pilots' endurance, G-tolerence, sight radius, etc. You can also level the tail gunners in your bombers. Additionally, you gain experience for each individual plane allowing you to buy upgrades that improve flight performance and armament.

This could be a good system; however, it means that new players are strong disadvantaged versus veterans, and it can be quite difficult to level up when many of your opponents are flying upgraded planes with higher level pilots, in addition to simply having more experience with the game.

Finally, it needs to be mentioned that there are balance issues between countries. Gaijin is a Russian developer. They're proud and patriotic. Because of this, the Russian tech tree has an entire team dedicated to working on its flight models; and the numbers they use for those models are extremely optimistic, sometimes drawn from old Soviet propaganda, rather than objective evaluation of performance. In contrast, all other countries share a single team working on their flight models, and many countries, especially the US and Japan, get rather shafted. When American fighters are outperformed by Russian heavy ground-attack aircraft in terms of maneuverability and climb rate, it's quite obvious that something is wrong.

In terms of overall performance, the tech trees can be ranked thusly:
Russia > Britain > Germany > US = Japan

It is also unlikely that this will be fixed in a timely manner. In addition to the Russian bias, Gaijin is also in the process of launching the Tank Warfare part of the game--which is awesome! But it means that the team has less time to work on improving the gameplay for airplanes.



Despite all of these flaws--is Warthunder still a good game? YES. Is it still worth your time? YES. I criticize this game because I love it. It is, in my opinion, the best online PC dogfighting game made to date--and it's coming to PS4 in just a couple days. It has the planes, the graphics, the controls, the progression. I haven't even gotten into Arcade vs Historical vs Full Real, and the differences in pacing and experience they bring. There is a LOT of content here. The only problems are balance and economy related, and that can all be fixed. The core experience is sound.

And it's free to pick up! So what are you waiting for? Join the game, dip your toe in with the biplanes and peashooters, and see if it catches your fancy. It caught me by surprise; but I'm glad it did.