Recent reviews by Evil Joe Bob

It's very good

The game is fun.

-Reggie Fils-Aime

War Thunder is the epitome of willfully wasted potential. The game has a great physics engine, highly detailed weapon-to-damage model interactions, and an amazing selection of vehicles that should (in theory) offer every player a perfect match for their preferred play styles and historical interests. However, War Thunder's good qualities are dramatically overshadowed by the decisions of its asinine money-grubbing developer.

The Gulag wardens at Gaijin Entertainment have spent years meticulously crafting WT's progression system to be as soul-crushing as possible; the grind is just unbearable. Are you a new player who wants to check out that cool F-15 or Abrams tank you saw in the trailers? Too bad, because you'll have to spend 500-1000 hours slaving away in the tech tree grinding out dozens of planes or tanks you probably won't care about at all. When you do finally unlock a vehicle you like you can start to have some real fun, right? NOPE! See, when you purchase a new non-premium vehicle (everything in the normal tech tree) you receive a gutted "stock" configuration of your brand-new tank or plane. Stock vehicles are nerfed in virtually every way imaginable. You'll have a weaker engine, less effective ammunition, slower turret traversal, no G-suit, etc. Hell, stock planes even have their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ drag coefficients nerfed. Of course, all of those examples look trivial when compared to the lack of missiles on stock cold war jets...

So you finally unlock a jet with guided missiles. Again, you'd think this is where you might find some fun, but no, Gaijin says "♥♥♥♥ you, you don't get missiles yet. You've gotta play dozens or more games with nothing but your guns (and/or a few obsolete decades-old missiles) against a full enemy team equipped with advanced radar missiles that can kill you from 15km away. Good luck!" Needless to say, this isn't exactly great fun.

If you want to mitigate any of that, you'll have to spend some serious money. Gaijin has somehow convinced its player base that spending $70 on one premium vehicle to grind out one half of one nation's vehicles in a few hundred games instead of a few thousand is a "good deal". Seriously that's a GOOD deal in this game. What the ♥♥♥♥?

The problems don't end there. The battle rating system is painfully bad. In most vehicles a downtier can feel pretty good, but in an uptier you'll get owned almost every time, especially in ground RB. Even games that should be balanced are tainted by overpowered vehicles that have no business being at their respective BR's. Oh yeah, and power creep obviates vehicles en masse every time a new update drops.

Ground RB is more or less tolerable if you're playing meta tanks but the gameplay loop of air RB is completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥. In props you'll spend 15 minutes AFK climbing from your airfield, maybe get a kill or two if you're decent at the game and lucky, then get absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ by a guy flying a premium fighter with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ air spawn. In higher tier jets you'll die in less than five minutes to a missile fired by someone who never even appeared on your screen because you were busy dodging a million other missiles from every conceivable angle.

Bottom line: The War Thunder experience is a never-ending masochistic slogfest that only gets slower and more painful the more you play. Don't bother, just pick a different game.

This game really makes you FEEL like a damned soul.

Extremely good. Probably the best TW game.

It's good.

Not as good as Kovaak's

Better than Aimlab

Very easy and forgiving; a perfect game for players new to the genre.



10/10