Recent reviews by Speedstang

I have 1379 hours on the game from their direct launcher. Started actually putting large amounts of time in late 2021 to now. I am entirely free to play on this game, with not a single penny spent.

The game is in an atrocious state, and each time you think it couldn't possibly get worse, Gaijin does not hesitate to sink to new lows. I have thousands of hours across many different online games. (You can see quite a few on profile, with many more off Steam.) I am always free to play or nearly free to play on everything, as I don't exactly have another choice. At this point, I can state with absolute certainty that I have never come across an F2P model as insanely predatory and awful as this one.

The game is explicitly designed to prevent you from progressing without paying or to otherwise frustrate you into paying at every possible point. I know that can be a cliche statement at this point, but no other PC title does it to these complete extremes.

On top of that, the actual game play itself is extremely badly designed, with minimal effort put in to have any level of balance or competitive integrity. It is once again, the worst PvP focused title I have ever encountered in that regard.

In an effort to keep things as concise as I can, here is a list of major issues with the game:

- Repair costs. Every vehicle in the game charges you for dying. The stated reason is to balance out "strong" vehicles, but in reality, that is never the case. Once you reach the mid ranks of a tree, you will start regularly losing SL (silver lions, the main currency) in each match, instead of gaining. This becomes a problem, as new vehicles you unlock cost increasingly large amounts of SL to purchase. If you cannot afford your repair cost, you cannot play the vehicle anymore.

- Vehicle Modifcations. Every tech tree vehicle in the game comes "stock", that is to say in a highly nerfed state. For aircraft, worse performance, bad ammo belts, bad accuracy, no flares or chaff (for jets), and no access to its secondary weapons (such as bombs or missiles.) For tanks and ships, extremely bad shells with poor penetration, worse speed, and no ability to repair or put out fires. Of course, you can pay large amounts of real life money to get these capabilities immediately, or suffer through dozens (or for some vehicles, HUNDREDS) of matches playing against far superior upgraded vehicles to obtain these.

- Compression. Vehicles are balanced by a "battle rating" (BR) system, which determines which vehicles can face each other in a match. This is meant to ensure balanced matches. However, this again is not used for this purpose. Instead, vehicles of vastly different eras are compressed into the same BR range. For example, on unlocking your new (stock) F-86 Sabre, you will be thrown into matches where you will face 30g overload, all aspect air to air missiles. These cannot be avoided with that aircraft. You die, and there is literally nothing you could've done about it. Now repeat this for hundreds of games to unlock the next plane. That is the reality of War Thunder.

- Premium Vehicles. These are special vehicles available at every BR range that you can only purchase with Golden Eagles (GE), the premium currency purchased with real life money. GE is usually not possible to earn. These vehicles are generally far too strong for their BR range, and will dominate their matches. They have minimal repair costs, and unlock other vehicles/earn SL much faster. They are intentionally kept strong in order to keep sales high. Despite their insane real life costs ($70 for top BR max earners), they are the only vehicles you will ever see at those BR ranges. Facing them with their (stock) tech tree counterparts is a truly miserable experience.

- Game play. The actual game modes available to play are atrociously designed. You will have matches end to AI shooting each other, you will be locked out of your preferred vehicle (in combined arms modes), and you will be spawn killed. A lot. This section in itself could be an entire essay, so I'm going to leave it at that. Don't come into this game expecting something like World of Warships, and definitely nothing like CS:GO or League of Legends. There is no logical competitive design here.

Something needs to change. Unfortunately this game has no real competition, and as such Gaijin has been able to get away with this nonsense successfully. If you do play this game, please do not give them any money. The only way things will ever change for the better is if they are left with no other choice. Every lost dollar counts.

Basically Ace Combat 7.5, if you've played any Ace Combat you'll feel right at home here. If you haven't and you're looking for a fun, story driven air combat game, look no further. (And check out Ace Combat 7 afterwards :P)

Disclaimers: I haven't played the Conquest roguelike game mode yet, so this review focuses on the campaign mode. This review is also based on the normal game, not VR, as I do not own a headset to try it.

Pros:
- Graphics look great, not quite Ace Combat 7 level, but still good. Some missions are quite cinematic.

- Story, lore, briefings, dialogue, etc, all feel just like Ace combat, and are quite good. No spoilers, but if you enjoy AC storytelling, you'll enjoy this.

- Soundtrack is AWESOME.

- Controls just like AC7 (with the exception of aircraft taking time to accelerate and decelerate more realistically) and free rebinding of controls.

- Super planes available for you to use just like AC, once you're able to unlock them. Incredibly fun.

- If you've played AC, you know that each plane can equip a special weapon. In Project Wingman, you can equip multiple different special weapons onto the same plane. Different planes have a different amount of hardpoints and weapon choices. Extremely fun to carry multiple types at once.

- The game feels a lot harder than AC7, (barring use of the super planes) and while this might not be a pro for everyone, I personally greatly enjoy the higher difficulty. There are no checkpoints and a LOT more missiles. Not to worry though, if you don't like difficulty or you are new to flying, the game still has an Easy difficulty option.

- Mercenary Difficulty. When you complete the game, you'll unlock this (basically the equivalent of Ace difficulty in AC), but unlike AC, it actually changes the game more significantly. You get a lot more enemies spawning and different types of enemies spawning. The game does feel significantly harder than just the base Hard mode.

- If you prefer playing on keyboard and mouse instead of a controller (I do), the camera control can be tied directly to the mouse movement, meaning instead of the really clunky camera controls in AC7, it feels more like the vehicle camera from something like GTA V. A very massive improvement, and something I hope to see end up a feature in future AC games.

- AOA Limiter. You won't see this until after your first playthrough, but if you liked post stall maneuvers in AC7, you are going to love this.

- Modding supported, lots of plane skins, visual changes, gameplay tweaks, and other things are available.

- Prez. Don't know what this means? Make sure you take a 2 seat aircraft into a mission to find out.

- And most importantly: THE VTOL CRAFT CAN ACTUALLY HOVER, BETTER THAN ACE COMBAT 11/10

Cons:
- No 2 seat super plane. Sorry Prez. :(

- Project Wingman 2 when?

- Why are you still reading cons? I still can't believe this is an indie game. It's awesome and $25 is a steal. Fantastic job by Sector D2. Go buy it!

Very immersive game with a well written plot, a must have.