Recent reviews by Eliphaser

Great game, the early game is extremely difficult but once you get enough armour in the peasant and commoner tiers (so second and third from the start), it's then easy cruising for a good while.

Lots of fun, lots of violence. Lots of things to know to do well (you can loot clothes and armour off of downed opponents, you can hire mercenaries for the day to turn the 2v1 and 3v1 matches into proper team fights - especially important for the tournaments to go to the next stage, chests and loot are on the maps so exploring after a victory is worth it, you get stronger as you fight and wield weapons more easily over time, etc)


Negative: the performance is horrible, expected from a UE5 game (most of those suffer from this), and the devs are working to fix this so I don't think this deserves a negative review, unless it stays this way for a while.

I think most people are just overly negative because of this disappointment, but the game remains playable, and some maps are pretty low on lag (the cave, yard, and somewhat the alley maps are generally fine in performance, slums and forests so far are the worst - probably due to the foliage or something like that).

Zotullah my beloved

Alright, so I've played this game a decent amount.
I'll start by admitting that I have actually somewhat appreciated the actual combat gameplay - though I'll note that over the years it got progressively more frustrating - BR compression feels rough in tank battles, resulting in frequent uptiers that makes weak vehicles virtually useless, and planes being omnipresent in both arcade and realistic ground battles, and especially in realistic, being way too frustrating to deal with, amongst other issues.

Now this just makes a few matches frustrating when it's really an issue, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is grind; if you don't develop an addiction on this game and don't play it constantly, apart from the very low tiers (which arguably are one of the few places you'll have actual fun playing either way, in my opinion), unlocking vehicles take ages. From the start of the vehicle tech tree, the grind has been significantly slower than planes, but they seemingly kept making it worse for both over the years, as it takes months of actual effort to reach anything remotely high end and especially getting enough vehicles to have a proper lineup.

Really, the most fun I've ever had in war thunder was the (sadly temporary) Dune-themed event. That's about the last time I played the game and the only reason I reinstalled it at the time. This had the advantage of no repair costs, no uptiers, no grinding for months to get the vehicles (since everyone had the same ones available), and just generally didn't have the most frustrating aspects this game has. Kinda wished the game would be actually like that instead of the ♥♥♥♥ we have instead.

I didn't really want to join the dislike bombing crowd, but I forgot to put out this statement before that.
(I lied. I think the game deserved large amount of criticism far earlier than now)

I'd gladly play the game again and update the review if they ever fix the stuff I complained about, but really I just think that for the last few years the experience of this game has gotten more and more miserable with a decent amount of players just feeding their addiction to this game more so than having actual fun playing, but whatever. At least the game is now finally receiving some well-deserved backlash for their predatory schemes, with hopes that they stop ignoring players for once.

Pretty Good game

-You can build stuff
-You can use the stuff you built to violently ram it inside someone else's stuff
-????
-Torment the crew of your ships by sending them into barely functional abominations that will explode and kill them all (the true victory in spirit is not the actual victory screen, but rather whoever had the highest death count)

I love sending tiny people to die against monsters significantly more powerful than my fleets, even if I could more effectively deal with them


It's a pretty solid RTS with some basic but solid nation management (military focus, of course), diplomacy, and other features. Fun to organise with friends or other people in a voicechat and have a chaotic conquest game.

A significantly higher depth to the ship design than an inexperienced player would assume, so if you want to increase your skills, there's a lot that can be done to improve, but don't forget to decorate your ships, as killing your friends or the AI in style is far better than in boring unpainted and undecorated ships (you can flex on them for having the prettier ships, and the ships that aren't exploded and unable to fly)

An underrated gem, but it's not for everyone. If you have any issue with the game though, don't hesitate to hop in the official discord server, where most of the active playerbase is located.

This game is only ironically fun, but exclusively if you have friends.

To start:
This game isn't exactly pay to win, you mostly just pay to attempt to skip the grind only to notice you are spending an insane amount of money for little progress. Now, there are DLCs that allow you to skip to heavy tanks, but you will neither have the skill to be able to use them immediately (and thus will suffer and lose in-game money), and you will notice that playing both as a tank or against tanks is equally unsatisfying.

The gameplay in this game is roughly akin to shoving a rusty metal pipe down your urethra by hitting it repeatedly with a hammer, all while having your eyes removed by a spoon and your genitals wired to a constant stream of high-voltage electricity. The fun to be had is only from how bad it is.
In terms of factions, you have the US, the Germans, and the Soviets
as I mostly played the germans, I can note that from this point of view, the US feels ridiculously overpowered and has practically every single tryhard that still play this game, while the soviets have players either as smart as bots or as annoying as top CSGO players. German and soviet weaponry from my experience looks directly worse than the near totality of US gear.

In short, the US is the least fun faction to fight due to the fact all the skilled players that haven't yet left are there, and they get most of the overpowered equipment.

Throwing grenades, something rather basic for ww2 stuff, is incredibly expensive. The cost of a single anti-infantry grenade is about the same as 400 shots of the default rounds of most guns, and you're less likely to kill people. Because yes, firing a bullet costs, because why not? it's FUN, right?

Fighting tanks is so stupidly expensive that you probably end up losing money in the fight if you're using more than weapons laying on the floor from a panzerfaust crate or a dead player's bazooka or panzershrek. But even with that, there's still tryhard enough players to track down your dirt cheap starter light tank and kill it with their bazooka. And they need to shoot you multiple times to kill you. With each rocket costing more than your light tank to spawn.

Vehicles. They could be interesting, but aren't. You just get stuck on anything, die of just about any dude that grinded for his bazooka, and curbstomp anyone that didn't. Infantry anti-tank weapons are more likely to make you lose money than anything, so they practically only exist to annoy tankers. The most interesting vehicles by far are the armoured cars, as they have an interior modelled and you can shoot the crew of them from the holes in them. But the problem is that you basically never see them, because they are only unlocked for the scout/sniper soldiers. Also, there's plenty of open-topped tank destroyers in the game, specially on the american side, but you can't even kill the crew from above either. It feels like armoured cars and tanks come from two different games and were mashed together in one.

Infantry play is pretty annoying too, I don't know what is up with the ironsights in this game but they feel horrible. They can't even "zoom" in to some degree to assist you in landing shots over the incredibly large and empty terrains a lot of the map feature regularly. Now, you can use scope, but for infantry, they don't really zoom in much, obscure your field of vision about as much as the regular ironsight, and have a repair cost quite high for every bullet you fire. So essentially, either you use a scope and can see or you can actually save up money to hopefully grind faster. As I previously mentionned, grenades are a thing, and I mean, they work, but cost so much for every throw that it's cheaper in the long term to throw your body in the meatgrinder with even modified guns. Anti-tank weapons are also pretty expensive to use to the point that using them a lot in a game can make you lose money. You can lose money from playing the game. And you can lose money from winning a game and killing many tanks, just because you threw too many grenades or used too many mines or anti-tank weapons.

The fun part also is that the stock light tanks are actually cheaper to spawn than any single shot of anti-tank equipment outside of panzerfausts costs you to fire. An anti-personnel mine is, if I remember correctly, about 10 times the price of a Panzer 1 spawn.

So, to conclude:
This game is best played ironically, and with friends. Alone, it's painful and I only recommend it to masochists or people that feel the need to punish themselves.
I mean, sure, you might enjoy the game, but I expect it to be more like shoving sandpaper down your urethra and violently pulling it out, in terms of satisfaction. (Won't judge if that's your kink, it's not my urethra and it's not my time you're spending on this game).

You can have fun with it though, and I even somehow managed that, by playing with one to three other friends and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ instead of actually trying to play. It's more enjoyable to forget this is an actual shooter and not a tractor racing simulator with live grenades.