Recent reviews by Unlimited Rice Pudding

TL;DR: Very fun, lots of variety, quite well-polished. Long grind to unlock new vehicles and typical FTP mechanics which encourage you to spend money. Presence of pay-to-win is debatable but probably exists in minor ways. Some balancing problems and poor developer decisions which mostly only affect long-time players in the higher tiers.

War Thunder is basically several good games packaged together, and is free to play, which together are enough of a reason to try it. You can play air battles, tank battles, and ship battles, each of which is split into an 'arcade' mode, a 'realistic' mode, and a 'simulator' mode. By far the most popular vehicles are aircraft and tanks. The naval mode was added more recently and is less fleshed-out. I'll mention air and tank battles in this review since they are the modes I am most familiar with.

• Air Arcade: This is probably the easiest game mode to get started with. The flight model is very forgiving, you have unlimited ammo (with timed reloads), aim markers appear in front of enemy players to help you lead your shots, you have multiple respawns in different aircraft, and there is no friendly fire. The maps are wildly unrealistic (enormous mountains and tunnels to fly through) but can be great fun especially at lower tiers. Aircraft of all nationalities are mixed together (although you can only play as one nation at a time).
  
• Air Realistic: This is the most popular game mode for mid-tier aircraft and upwards. The flight model is less forgiving, the maps are much bigger and realistic (i.e. mostly flat), you have limited ammo, no lead indicators to help you shoot, only one aircraft to spawn in with, and there is friendly fire. Aircraft of the same nationalities and alliances are placed on the same teams (e.g. Axis vs Allies).
  
• Air Simulator: The same as air realistic, except that you must use a joystick, you are limited to an in-cockpit camera view, and there are no HUD or map markers for allied or enemy players so you have to do your own identification to avoid friendly fire.
  
  
• Ground Arcade: Maps are small, tanks are unrealistically quick and easy to drive, enemy players in line-of-sight have HUD and map markers so it's difficult to play stealthily, and you have a penetration indicator when aiming at enemy players which tells you whether or not your shell will penetrate their armour and damage them at the exact spot and angle you're aiming at. Tanks of all nations are mixed together in teams. Friendly fire is disabled, and you have three spawns.
  
• Ground Realistic: Again, the most popular game mode beyond the lowest tiers. Maps are larger, tank handling is slower and more difficult, there are no HUD markers for enemies (but they can be marked on the map by allied players), and no penetration indicator. Teams are separated by nationalities and historical alliances. Friendly fire is disabled. Spawns are tied to 'spawn points,' which you accrue by destroying enemies and completing objectives. You can only play each of your tanks once, but you can spawn multiple times if you earn enough spawn points to do so. If you die without earning enough points to spawn in again, then the game is over for you.
  
• Ground Simulator: The same as realistic, except that you are limited to a 'first-person' commander's view from the top of your tank, the gunsight for aiming is placed on its actual location on the tank, making it slightly harder to aim accurately, and there are no enemy or friendly HUD or map markers, meaning you have to identify your targets as friendly fire is enabled. Tanks are also sorted into a number of period-specific 'vehicle lineups' (e.g. early WWII, 1944, 1945, Cold War) which are rotated on a daily basis, meaning only some vehicles are available for simulator battles on any given day.

The vehicles in War Thunder span much of the 20th Century, and now the 21st Century as well. You start with a selection of pre-WWII vehicles and unlock later vehicles as you play. This process starts off quickly to begin with, but gradually becomes very slow as you unlock higher-rank vehicles. This grind is the developers' way of making money from the game, as you can pay for a premium account which drastically speeds up the process. The grind becomes so long at higher tiers that I can reasonably say: if you do not want to spend any money on this game, then realistically you will probably never get to play Cold War vehicles, unless you sink in a huge amount of time. If you come to War Thunder looking for a WWII game, then you don't need to worry much about the grind as you'll get most of the WWII vehicles relatively quickly. If you want to play jet fighters and Abrams tanks, however, then be prepared to put in hundreds of hours before you will get the chance to do so, unless you pay.

This is somewhat contentious as there are some long-time players who insist there are pay-to-win elements in the game and others who insist there are not. There are some vehicles in the game which are not accessible through the normal tech tree and can only be acquired by paying money for them ('premium vehicles'). These vehicles are not overpowered in and of themselves, but there is a question as to where they are placed alongside the normal tech tree as this affects which other vehicles they go up against. Some of these premium vehicles are arguably overpowered just because they sit too low in the tree and face too many weaker vehicles as a result. However, it's worth pointing out that the same arguments are had over a number of the standard, non-premium vehicles, which some players think should be moved into different parts of the tech tree to better balance them.

War Thunder has indisputably had pay-to-win elements in the past, most notably the tank camouflage decorations. These are pieces of foliage you can add to your tank which can make it harder to see if you place your tank intelligently amongst bushes on the map. When these were first added to the game, they were only accessible by paying money for them. This sparked outrage amongst the playerbase which caused the developers to make them available through a grinding process without having to spend any money. However, this grind is very long and at best you can acquire one piece of camouflage per month this way, whereas you can still buy them all immediately if you are prepared to pay. The advantage they offer is small and situational, but it is there nonetheless and is probably the most obvious example of a pay-to-win element in the game.

This game is easy to learn but difficult to master. The skill ceiling is quite high, particularly for the realistic and simulator game modes. Air battles depend greatly on dogfighting skill and the ability to spot a good opportunity which won't leave you vulnerable to attack, whereas ground battles depend on intimate knowledge of the maps and the various weak spots on all the tanks. Critically, the matchmaking system is based exclusively on the 'battle rating' of the vehicle(s) you select before entering a game (basically, where they sit in the tech tree) and does not take player experience into account. Typically, more experienced players play vehicles with high battle ratings, but there is nothing to stop them playing entry-level vehicles which are the only vehicles new players have available to them. This means new players may have a frustrating time getting to grips with War Thunder as they might end up facing vastly more experienced players on a regular basis. This is particularly noticeable in tank battles, in which new players unfamiliar with the maps will probably be frequently killed by players they couldn't see because they are unaware of the likely places where enemy players will hide.

TL;DR: Great game but very poorly optimised, buyer beware

I'd like to recommend Post Scriptum because it really is an excellent and unique game, but unfortunately it is plagued by crippling performance issues which render it unplayable at times. The game is very poorly optimised, such that even if your system exceeds the recommended specifications you may experience constant stuttering which essentially makes it impossible to play, at least at a level at which you can compete effectively with other players. There is no official word from the developers on this issue other than 'we're working on it,' and a guide on the support section of their website which recommends increasing your virtual memory page file size to improve performance, which had no effect for me. Many people say that an SSD is required to play this game - I have one and still experience terrible stuttering. My system meets or exceeds all the recommended requirements (12-core 3.6Ghz CPU, 6GB VRAM GPU, 16GB DDR4 RAM, SSD) and often the game still does not run at an acceptable standard on the minimum graphical settings.

There does not seem to be any pattern of affected hardware judging from the reports of other players suffering from the same issues: it affects both Nvidia and AMD users at the very least. It does seem that some maps are much worse than others - for example I have never experienced any stuttering on Utah Beach, but I cannot play any games on Oosterbeek or St Mere Eglise at all. Apparently the developers have a history of releasing very poorly optimised maps (i.e. 'Chapter 2') and then trying to 'clean them up' later. The game received the 'Chapter 3' update at the beginning of this year which included a number of new maps, many of which run terribly and which have not been fixed in the months between then and now. I am simply resigned to avoiding servers which are currently on those maps, hoping there is a populated server on one of the maps which don't stutter for me, and wishing that the developers start focussing on optimisation so I can enjoy the entirety of the game I have paid for.

In essence, buying this game at the moment is a lottery with regards to whether or not it will run properly for you. I strongly recommend trying it out in case it works, though, so here's what I suggest: buy it, install it, and spend your two-hour refund window playing games on as many different maps as possible, perhaps spending around five to ten minutes in each map. If you experience stuttering on any of the maps (or more maps than you are happy to accept you cannot play on), then refund it and wait for the developers to properly optimise the game before buying it again.

One final thing to mention is that a huge part of the fun in this game comes from its playerbase. The game is designed around squads of up to nine players in regular VOIP communication with each other, sticking together and working towards the same short-term goals. If you join a server full of people who aren't doing these things, or don't want to do them yourself, then it can be a rather stale experience. Basically, the value and uniqueness of this game hinge on the extent to which the players in a given match choose to play it as it was intended to be played. If you don't want to join a clan then you have no guarantee when you start up Post Scriptum that you'll end up having the sort of game the developers are aiming for. The playerbase is also relatively small, which means that if you want to play a game outside of the typical peak hours for your geographical region you may be out of luck.