Recent reviews by Kind der Sonne

I absolutely love this game! It takes the best things from Diablo III and Path of Exile and combines them into an easy-to-understand experience with loads of customization potential. I also have only rarely encountered server struggles this week.

New update brings CRASHES, IMPOSSIBLE GRIND and makes War Thunder an unofficial PAY TO PLAY and PAY TO WIN!

I played this game a lot. A lot meaning for over 4 years (that's just the time I remember playing in).
1) THE GRIND was made worse and worse - the current update further decreases the research points (= vehicle progression) and silver lions (=primary currency for vehicle and upgrade purchases). During my last 10 games, I made an average of around 500RP and 20kSL /game. THIS MEANS that I would have to play 780!!!!!! games WITHIN THE SAME NATION to unlock the new top tier vehicles. With the average game taking up between 5-20 minutes, this would mean that I would have to spend 162 HOURS (YES HOURS!!!) just for one more vehicle. That's ridiculous. Keep in mind that this was estimated for non-premium users, meaning without spending additional money on the game.

2) Gaijin is a greedy a** company - when you play through the game, you earn REAL research points (everyone earns them for their vehicle tree) and there is the option of investing real life money to buy Golden Eagles - the premium currency of War Thunder. These can be traded for Silver Lions, spent instead of Research Points to buy upgrades for a specific vehicle immediately, used to purchase premium vehicles OR used to speed up your progression in the tech tree.
The last option is my main point. When playing, you not only gain the standard RP, but also rack up sort of "bonus premium RP" - extra RP that you can use in exchange for the premium currency Golden Eagle. So in the end it is a faster progression system which allows players with less time and more money to have a similar progression with the need to still have to grind A LITTLE (before the last updates).

Here comes the problem - in comparison to earlier versions of the game, the extra progression was MORE THAN HALVED. With the increased grind needed due to the updates, this means that you'd have to SPEND LITERAL HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS for the new top tier vehicles, because you would have to buy the extra RP first AND THEN would have to spend another bunch of GE for the SL trade, to unlock the vehicle itself, even after you've researched it.

The progression system in War Thunder was long a heated topic in all WT forums FOR YEARS. Gaijin didn't give sh*t of what their community wants. The grind was increased steadily over a period of 2 years now. With the tech tree growing longer and longer, this grind is now made UNBEARABLE. Yes, I've spent hundreds of Euros for War Thunder premium account, premium vehicles (which are the only fair priced items in the shop as of now) and both RP and SL to unlock standard vehicles. With the steady addition of new top tier vehicles, the grind needed for the new additions is also made EVEN WORSE than its earlier relatives. Just the idea of INCREASING the grind needed for the new vehicles TRIPLES the grind needed to play them and can IN NO WAY BENEFIT THE COMMUNITY.

3) New Dagor Engine - but no one asked for it :')
The Dagor Engine (current version 6.5) is War Thunder's game engine, which is constantly updated to match newest games, graphics and entertainment systems. First of all, this is a good thing, since games like World of Warcraft or CS:GO are limited to their game engine and cannot implement RayTracing, weather systems or new shaders without major rehauls. The regular updates to the Dagor Engine allow War Thunder to always have PHENOMENAL GRAPHICS, SOUND, ATMOSPHERE and add just so much more REALISM to the game.

HOWEVER, these last engine updates resulted in HUGE resource requirements. War Thunder released on PS4, XBOX ONE and the newer consoles, but with its updates to the engine, it sets the minimum requirements for PC players to unbearable heights. Right now, you would have to NEED ONE OF THE LATEST GPUs TO COMPENSATE for the huge resources poured out by the Dagor Engine. Weather simulation, fog, rain, ray tracing, ballistics, 4K resolutions on vehicles... the list goes on. With the HUGE MAPS now in the game, this resource waste is immense, performance problems, lag spikes and game crashes when exiting the game are a lot more common.

CONCLUSION:
With the newest Dagor Engine update, War Thunder looked and sounded better than ever, But its gameplay doesn't anymore. The fps holes are getting bigger with each update and War Thunder doesn't run smooth if you don't posses the latest High-End gaming PC out there.
The GRIND permanently added seems to actively hinder players. I don't doubt that this is a strategy deployed by Gaijin, so more people invest real money to play their games.
MY ADVISE - if you are new to the game or think of playing it, please reconsider. This company is greedy, does not care of their community and MUST NOT BE SUPPORTED ANYMORE.
For the veteran War Thunder players, I urge you to share your thoughts about the current game status. The community needs to own up to the company. Gaijin slowly destroys the game with its monetization policy and makes this beautiful and immersive game become a money sink without a bottom.

-Please let me know, how you feel about the latest changes and what hardware you use to run War Thunder smoothly.

Early Access - More like Early Abandoned

So, since its release in 2015 I thought this game might have a future.
However, I waited, since it released on early access and its big brother "Space Engineers" felt more of a success to me at that time than Medieval Engineers.

Now, in March 2019, I got myself to buy this game with its still moderate ratings.
Now I also understand, why this game gets hated so much.

1.Abuse of "Early Access" - Many titles nowadays release as an EA-title to compensate their lack of effort and just pure laziness to release unfinished, buggy games- which, this title DOES NOT make any exception.

2. Bugs have not been addressed in 4 years - Simple bugs which all quickly will ruin the fun in your tempting survival mode adventure just end up killing you or simply let your castle explode after you gathered resources for it for the last some hours.

Some examples:

If you cut a tree, EVERY TIME its leaves will bug out and jump around like crazy. If you happened to stay near one of this "jumping deaths" as they should be called - you die due to collision damage.

If you try closing a gate or a door with just an enemy corpse of barbarians which you successfully murdered at your front doors... well you can guess... door collides with the despawning enemy corpse, leading to break down the whole gate which might result in collapsing your whole castle at once.

I died one time simply, because I needed to pee and presses ESC which opens up the menu and pauses the game.
However, this time the game just did not pause and never paused again after this point on, which ended up in me being afk-killed by mobs.

Conclusion:
Medieval is a game with a nice idea, just very badly assembled.
Bugs are the same which existed back in day 1 and the studio does not seem to give a damn about their EA supporters.
Coding is poor, the company shows and did not show any sign of making this game better or fixing stuff at all.
The engine is so bad, that you get frame locked and the game still nearly crashes when you rotate your camera a bit too fast for the engine.

This game is a bad joke. Better waste this money with buying you a nice meal and consume it one time rather than spending hours of gameplay just to lose it, because some company f*cked sh*t up.

Edit: No, I was not playing the game back then on its release, however these bugs were the exact same ones being the reason I have never touched this game. My own fault for thinking, something changed in just 4 years. :'^)