Recent reviews by ALKAER

It's oke

*To make this review a bit more interesting, you could try taking a shot every time the word vehicle is mentioned*


As of now I have spent almost 200 hours on this game.

I do not think you should waste your time, and definitely not your money on this game.
Here is why.

• Gameplay
  
• Micro-transactions & Pay to Win/Play Mechanics

Gameplay
First off is the grind. This is what the whole game is centred around, and this is what you will spend most of your time doing.

Lineup
Before entering a match you can select a lineup of low tier vehicles, designated with the "Reserve" battle rating (BR).
Each vehicle has a BR which determines the rank of you and your enemies vehicles. This also helps to indicate what era the vehicles belong to. However this is not always the case, I will get into further detail later.

Your lineup starts with two open slots, to which one vehicle can be assigned.
You can purchase a few slots for Silver Lions (SL), which is the normal currency in the game.
However, if you then want to purchase even more slots, these will have to be bought using Golden Eagles (GE) which is a premium currency you will need to spend real money on obtaining. I will get into more detail later.


Game modes
You have the option to play either "Arcade" or "Realistic" game modes with either aeroplanes, ground vehicles, helicopters or ships.

Arcade is as the name suggests this mode is more arcade-like.
Here you get aim assistance which works by either letting you know how far to lead ahead on planes, or where to aim on a tank to be able to penetrate its armour.

Besides this, close enemies are also marked with a red outline.

Vehicles also move faster, and tanks for example will move their turrets faster as well.
This is to entice a quicker way to play the game. This will earn you less currency (SL) and less research point (RP) when compared to "Realistic"
RP is used to research the next vehicle with a higher BR.


Realistic on the other hand attempts to be a more serious way to play the game, and the one which me and many others have spent the majority of our time.

In this game mode the vehicles behave in a slower and more realistic way.
You will not have any aim assistance, or outlines on enemy vehicles.


Balance
Here is where my first issue with this game arises.
The game will match you up with other players based on your lineups BR, which is determined based on the vehicle with the highest BR. Here the game will either "Up Tier", "Down Tier" or "Evenly Tier" you against enemies.

This is in place to assert some sort of balance to the gameplay.
However in its current state it is far from perfect.

It is worth noting that based on my own experience, it seems more likely that you will be up-tiered in most matches.

One example being up-tiered in WW2 vehicles by getting matched up with cold war era vehicles, instead of other WW2 vehicles.

Since there are big leaps between these two era's when it comes to technology and performance, the cold war vehicles have a big advantage. This is obvious and leads to a bad experience for whoever got down-tired.

Of course this would be acceptable if we were talking about early WW2 vehicles vs late WW2.


Now in Gaijin’s defence, this is most likely necessary in order to get people into matches faster, instead of spending a long time in queues.

However the community has complained about this for years, with nothing being done by the developers.


Hit Registration
My second complaint is with the hit registration in the game.
You fire your weapon and if you hit an enemy, a small window will display what happened to the enemy you shot, and whether or not the vehicle’s modules were damaged or if the vehicle was destroyed.

During this moment the system will also calculate whether or not the shot penetrated the enemy's armour. Here a phenomenon known as “getting gaijined” comes up. There are many examples of this online, and it basically boils down to you hitting an enemy in a spot you expect to penetrate. But the game decides that you didn’t.


Good Parts of The Gameplay
Now there are of course also good moments in this game, which is what has kept me from uninstalling it so far.

Getting into evenly or up-tiered matches, and straight up just being lucky does make this game feel good.
However I believe that the developers have managed to refine these types of matches, so there is just far enough between them for you to keep your interest in the game.


Micro-transactions & Pay to Win/Play Mechanics
Now this part of the review ties into the gameplay, since the main goal of this game is to reach the top tier vehicles, the developers decided to include micro-transactions.

These include the following.

• Golden Eagles
  
• Premium Account
  
• Premium Vehicles
  
• Convertible RP

Golden Eagles
The GE currency is used to speed up your grind, or to give you an advantage over your enemy.

Here is a price comparison of the amount of GE you can buy in-game.


Price per GE is 0.0066 EUR

To speed up your grind, the GE can be spent on instantly unlocking extra equipment for your vehicle, purchasing 3D camouflage to make important parts of your ground vehicles hidden, and also make you harder to spot.

Premium Account
Buy spending either real money, or GE you can purchase a premium account status.

This will currently give you the following bonuses.

+100% RP gain from all game modes.
+50% SL for *active actions in **random battles.
+100% SL reward for battle time in **random battles.
+50% SL from other game modes.

* Active actions are all you do ingame, like capturing a point or destroying an enemy.
** Random battles are modes inside the arcade and realistic

Besides these benefits you also increase the amount of missions, which gives rewards.
You are allowed to exclude some maps from you map pool.
You get an extra 2 slots for stickers on you vehicles (not camouflages)

Premium Vehicles
Premium Vehicles give +100% RP and 2x more SL, and can be bought for GE.

A high tier premium vehicle will set you back around 60+ EUR

Do also keep in mind that if said premium vehicle is in let’s say tier 5 and you are researching a tier 7 vehicle then the amount of RP awarded towards that vehicle will be diminished, just as it would with a regular tier 5 vehicle.

Convertible RP
This part ties into the part about GE.
At the end of each battle when you are rewarded, you will also save up some convertible RP.
This can be spent freely on research of any vehicle, at the cost of GE. 1 GE = 45 RP.

This is set in place to entice people to spend real money to skip the last part of your grind for a new vehicle, by unlocking it a little faster.


Conclusion
The concept of this game is great, but is executed in a very bad way, and entices people to spend a lot of real money in order to progress at a reasonable pace.

My only reason for still playing this game, is that there really is no better alternative out there.
World of Tanks is an option, and is perhaps better or worse in some aspects. It is a game I have also spend a lot of hours in, but not one that I would recommend either. These games are both equally frustrating and equally money hungry.

My advice is to save your mentantly and wallet from this excuse of a free to play game, and find something better to spend your time on.

I hope you all have a great day :)

It's pretty good :)

It's Pretty good

wohaaa

This game is f***ing awesome, go play