Recent reviews by Oxbow

Play with friends is a blast, never had so much fun screamingly running away from a huge spider. Graphics style is quite nice. Downside is that you have to be logged in via the xbox ecosystem and having a bit of trouble connecting to my friends games at times.

One of the few early access games I am very happy to have bought. Great game and near infinite fun with the awesome modding sceen

Evergreen, this game will never die!

Now this first part is and addition to my following review and is based on the current developments! Lately, more than before Gaijin has become very ignorant on the whished of the community and started implementing new vehicles/Matchmaking which virtually breaks the gameplay. They seem not primed on changing their very bad community support and forum moderators. The game is still fun on occation but the company really seemes set on to break the good experience for many players. If you dont beleieve me just go to Reddit or the more controlled forums and see what the playerbase is about.
I will leave this preface to my review untill Gaijin moves in a direction which will benefit the game and the playerbase!

I do like the game quite a lot, I came from WoT back in the day when tanks were announced as the more realistic damage model with internal components and no dedicated pool of health appealed to me... This is how I started to love planes!
Comming for the tanks in closed beta it was inevitable to not fly planes and I got hooked fast, starting out with arcade and moving on to realistic and eventually staritng to enjoy Simulator with my HOTAS I bought.
The game is facinating.
With the amount of vehicles and ammo types it offers, once the initial flying and shooting for fun has reached a threshhold one can immerse one self in learning maneuvers, planes, tanks, ammo, and team-play this game really unlocks its potential and challenges me on multiple levels.
As the game officially still is in open beta there is a lot of change happening and not all of that change is always good. Balancing and bugs just being the normal thing to see in games in general to sometimes more critically view decisions by the developers and the compulsive need of adding vehicles even though many current vehicles still suffer from imbalance or faulty fight models. To be fair though many of these issues are getting fixed after some time and as it theory still is bata I am able to accept it as part of the development.
As many free to play titles, war thunder features an ingame shop to finance development, it includes cosmeticals, premium account, and premium vehicles. The latter adding planes that do not feel overpovered for me (as they use to be variants of non premium aircraft, or novelty vehicles with strengths and weaknesses). However there are a couple of nation crossover/captured planes which have gotten some critic as this decreases the nations variety and it has been observed that many of these planes sometimes get spammed into battles.
Another big point seems to be the matchmaker and the battlerating system which workes in "mysterious" ways (as a lack for the actuall knowledge as how it works) matching both tanks and planes up against vehicles way beyont the fighting power (and time era) they actually fought in resulting an an explicit imbalance of power.
To make a little round-up for you guys that dont want to get stuck in a wall of text and points that I did not elaborate on:

-Large variety of vehicles both ground and air (naval to come)
-Three distinct game modes that make the game feel like three different once (arcade, realistic, and simulator)
-Combined arms events where both planes and tanks can be used in the same battle
-ingame store whith cosmeticals and veicles (vehicles seem balances but many crossover nation vehicles seem to blurr the lines between nations special appeal)
-Big mata game and real life tactics to learn to improve gameplay
-Currently Beta, bugs and dev. changes do not always resonate well in the community but on the big picture the game seems to work well and its fun and engaging to play
-Battle rating and matchmaker seem to sometimes make unfair matches (to get in to a match there must be certain consessions to keep the waiting within acceptable limits, however an option for players that would rather wait longer time to get in to more balanced battles or 1 nation per team only battles could be nice)