World of Tanks is a great, accessible shooter that you'll probably end up spending some money on even though you don't have to.
Hear the title, see a few screenshots, and you could be forgiven for assuming that World of Tanks is a simulation game inaccessible to anyone who doesn't know the difference between a T20 and a T29. That's not the case at all though; World of Tanks is a shooter first and foremost, with uncomplicated controls and a relatively sedate pace that make it easy to get into. Furthermore, it's a free-to-play game that, while loaded with plenty of ways for you to spend money, can be enjoyed for countless hours without ever doing so. World of Tanks wouldn't be difficult to recommend even if reaching for your wallet was a prerequisite, so recommending that you give it a try for free is a no-brainer.
World of Tanks even controls like a shooter; you use the WASD keys for movement and the mouse to aim and shoot. There are some other controls used for things like enabling cruise control, locking your turret so that it doesn't follow your mouse as you look around, and switching between different shell types, but familiarizing yourself with these can wait until you're comfortable with the basics. You don't need to memorize any advanced controls or techniques before climbing into a tank and entering a battle for the first time because, unlike many online shooters, World of Tanks is a game that you can ease yourself into without repeatedly dying at the hands of experienced players. That's largely because when you enter a battle you're matched with players who are driving tanks comparable to your own. Go to war in the lightweight tier 1 tank that you start your career with, and you're unlikely to fight alongside or against even tanks from the slightly more powerful tier 2, much less the heavyweight beasts from tiers 7 through 10. Conversely, when you're driving one of the big boys after investing many hours (or perhaps many dollars) to unlock them, you don't get to steamroll the new kids.
One of the great things about World of Tanks is that even if you find a favorite tank and stick with it, you're never quite sure how your next battle is going to play out. Not only are maps randomly selected from a sizable and varied collection, but you might find that your tank is the most powerful on the field in one game and then among the weakest in the next. What you never find, though, is that one team obviously outclasses the other--at least not where the quality of their vehicles is concerned. Before any battle gets under way you get to see a list of all 30 players that details the vehicles they're using and makes it easy to tell, at a glance, whether one team has more tank destroyers or self-propelled guns (more commonly referred to as artillery or "arty") than the other. You and your teammates can plan your strategy accordingly, though in practice the chat window used to communicate with each other rarely gets a lot of use. On the other hand, the minimap--which you can click on to immediately highlight areas for your comrades--is a quick and effective way to coordinate and to draw attention to enemy locations. Not that you even need to do that a lot of the time; every vehicle in World of Tanks is equipped with a radio that automatically relays positions of sighted enemies to comrades who are in communication range. As a result, providing useful intel for your teammates requires almost zero effort on your part, which is great news for anyone using artillery.
You're free to try to fill any role on the battlefield regardless of your vehicle choice, but artillery are so lightly armored that job one when you're driving one is to stay far away from the enemy. Job two is to use your long-range gun to destroy enemies before they even have a chance to spot you. As the commander of an artillery unit, you can target enemies using a bird's-eye view of the battlefield on which you can see any enemies that your teammates have sighted. You can zip your targeting reticle around the screen as fast as your mouse will let you, but it generally takes your gun a while to catch up. Furthermore, even once you have an enemy in your gun's sights you'll notice that the target area has lots of room for error. Because the target area shrinks over time, the challenge comes from knowing when to shoot; click that left mouse button too early, and there's a good chance you'll miss, but wait too long, and the enemy you're homing in on might move or disappear from your map because he's no longer in visual range of your teammate who scouted him. Playing as artillery is a lot of fun when you're grouped with players who will both scout for and defend you, but that's not always the case, and as with all vehicles in World of Tanks, the map that you end up playing on has an impact on how effective you can be. Get stuck playing on one of the city maps, and buildings often obscure your shots, for example.
When you're not in the mood to play as artillery you can choose to drive either a regular tank or a tank destroyer. The choice might seem obvious given the names, but while tank destroyers undoubtedly hit hard enough to live up to their name, they also don't have nearly as much armor as tanks. If an enemy gets behind you or manages to attack you from the side, you're going to take a lot of damage, so when driving a tank destroyer, you need to think about staying unseen, which might mean equipping a camo net and/or remaining still for extended periods of time. The biggest disadvantage that the vast majority of tank destroyers have versus tanks is that their guns are fixed rather than mounted on turrets, so the only way to target an enemy off to one side of you is to turn your entire vehicle around. That can be a painfully slow process, and it can also make you visible to enemies who otherwise might not have had any idea that you were nearby. Driving a tank destroyer is perhaps the most challenging way to play World of Tanks, but it can also be the most satisfying. In a tank destroyer you're powerful enough to defend your base long after most of your teammates have been killed, and fast enough to then make a dash for the enemies' base if you'd rather win by capturing it than by completely eradicating the opposition.
Justin's youth was largely misspent playing Commodore 64 and Amiga games. He left the UK's Official PlayStation Magazine to join GameSpot in 2000, believes that he's one of the best Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe players in the world, and puts HP Sauce on everything.
This review is out of date, since the game has changed dramatically in the last couple of years thanks to the physics system and several new nations, but it's awesome awesome awesome :D.
I'd ignore all the nay sayers in the comments below. Like most popular games there are people who just want to complain, but don't know what they're talking about.
Awesome game really cant put it down..
Devs are also doing a great job at keeping updates coming, tons of new tanks have been added, proper physics and a nice graphics update..
Also they you can you buy premium rounds with money made in game, you used ot just be able to get this type of ammo with real money so making it available for ingame money have removed the only thing that used to make this game pay 2 win.. Sure there are still premium tanks avilable but none of them are better than the same teir standard tanks, infact they are a lot worse.
Good advice: Play it for Free - Forever. Do not ever spend a dime, especially on the SEA server. At first their "pro" minions using junk accounts will let you win easily so that you will think "oh yes, I can be good at this" and spend some money on it but then comes the trolling (ie. Team Killing but worst of all losing won games on purpose just to keep your "win rate" in line when this is suppose to be a team result).
The game is actually fine were it not for the greedy and corrupt elements of the so called "community" in that region and this is bringing its class down making it a cheapskates game. There are also so called "mods" that give unfair advantage and should be considered cheats. Also if you spend on premium tanks these "pro" monkeys will call you wallet warrior noob, etc...spam the screen wen u don't follow their commands, etc... its not fun at all.
3 Like It is clear the press got pampered while playing the game and did not stick around for any length of time to get to know anyone.
Devs: They do not care about any feedback from the player base even if it is well thought out. They do not even listen to it from the test server which is supposed to help iron out tanks. The lead developer also has a huge racist curb against German's and has even been known to flick off his own fans.
Forum Mods: The forum mods will spend more time trying to defend their friends with over zealous vigor then any game forum you've been on in years. You will get account bans in the game or forum for looking at their brown nosing friends wrong. They will also allow pretty much any rampant wrong to go on for ages until you say -anything- negative about the developers. Then they go into hard kgb mode against you. Not joking on the implied either.
Bugs: There are a great many bugs left over from the beta. Shells that leave your gun but disappear instantly, shells that sometimes pass through tanks, getting stuck in the terrain, MM issues with arty, stuff like that. Then they make new bugs like making the game crash every 3-4 games as well as when you tab out 'n' back in. Then they deny responsibility for it and blame the video card developers.
Power Creeping: They nearly always make a few of the new tanks OP beyond words on purpose to encourage people to buy gold to get them. Only to nerf them a few weeks later into the ground after the purchase rate goes down. Nearly every older tank in the game becomes useless when compared to the newer tanks introduced. This happens at every tier level. The issues with the tanks were often mentioned on the test server but ignored.
Gold: The F2P model here is exploited in a great many ways. They charge a high price for low tier premium tanks, premium accounts, and gold in general. The conversion rates of gold for credits are horrid with free exp not far behind. A years worth of premium will also cost you a hundred bucks. Something that at that price would become permanent for that much in most other games. They even want 50 bucks for the best credit earning tanks in the game of real cash.
Fake Cash: They make sure the default rate of any tank past tier 7 cannot pay for itself so that you have to play lower tier tanks to be able to run higher tiers. Then they keep making the low tier tanks earn less every few weeks. Thus -encouraging- you to need a premium account or tank to be able to afford to play with your friends or with anyone at all.
Lack of hardware support: The game has a lack of support for things such as multiple cores, crossfire, sli-mode, etc. Thus you are bottle necked down on high end pc's into frame skips and other issues. Due, to the lack of optimization.
Customer Support: The customer support section is really a bad joke. They will nearly always answer your ticket on almost every issue after at least a day or after the issue disappears. Especially when this comes to penalty appeals. Which can cause issues if people in low tier tanks kill themselves on your tank on purpose. As the auto-ban team damage system will nail you asap. They will answer it only after the ban is lifted just so they do not have to speak with you. The support team will also blame you for connection issues even if you can prove with pingplotter it is at their server end.
High Turnover: Due to many of the issues above the game loses as many people as it gains. So thus a majority of the new players have no idea how to play the game but buy their way into high tier tanks anyways. Thus making playing solo a headache at best as there are almost no experienced players left. As they have all already left.
Bots: Bots are a huge issue and pretty much no action is taken against them. It is not uncommon to see the same person running a bot that causes you to lose a game for weeks on end with you reporting them every day. Wargaming just doesn't care at all.
Korean Like Grind: The exp system to gain tanks is like Aion or Everquest in scope. You will spend an amazing amount of time without spending ungodly amounts of cash just trying to get new tanks. Only to find out it isn't your play style, you dislike it, it costs to much to run the tank, etc. That or the newest tanks make your latest tank a bad joke. So nobody will want you for clan wars and thus you have to start over again with the long painful grind down a single tank line. Expect to invest a HUGE amount of time in the game to do anything.
If I was to give this game a rating? I'd have to put it at the lowest end of the totem pole every time.
@KorleeM Having played the game quite a while now I can confidently say that everything you just said is total rubbish, that you came up with in your head .....
If you don't like the game then the best solution is just don't play it.
1 Like KorleeM is 100% correct. After almost 2 years, hundreds of dollars, and eleven top tier tanks, this game has run it's course. Currently, the top players hate the SPG class and have been team killing them at the start of battle. WG has done nothing to stop this, nor do they fix the problem that started it (bad MM for SPG class). Forum trolls decide who can post and who cannot (via coordinated troll attacks) and the moderators do nothing (they are in the trolls clans). Could have been a great game, but the only thing WG cares about is taking your money.
Good riddance to bad rubage
@Bethor123 what a shocking idea that a company might want money ...
I can't say I've ever seen people kill their own arties, let alone do it regularly. If that's what you do then I think you might want to look at yourself ...
Where do you people get this sort of stuff? It's exaggeration on a grand scale :S.
@KorleeM nobody really cares what you think... most people like this game. WoT was also rather good in balancing the premium and free account things. It was far from pay2win. Free accounts could get similar/equal/greater firepower than premium accounts if they worked hard enough. Paid accounts are for lazy people.
Many bugs/glitches have been fixed since beta, I don't know what you are talking about there. Most prevalent being the red screen glitch, which was partially addressed in the 8.0 update.
You seem to have a similar attitude to Carolyn Petit after her Gravity Rush review: she hated it, but everyone else who played it loved it. (As a result, much of the PS Vita community disregarded poor Carolyn's opinion.)
The game is simple fun, and a tactical game at the same time. The variety of tanks you can play combined with the historical accuracy of the models and their in game weak spots make it all the more interesting and enjoyable. While I do enjoy this game to no end, and I don't plan on quitting any time soon, there are some major issues that I would love to see fixed. The matchmaking system will sometimes put tanks into fights in which they have very little chance to effect the outcome of the battle. Playing artillery in a fight where you can barely scratch the enemy can be infuriating, and playing a light tank going up against heavy tanks several tiers above you can leave u feeling completely useless.
The other big issue I've found is the inconsistency in rewards for any non-heavy tank player. Often someone playing a heavy tank can roll forward, get kills, thus earning more money and experience, even though they are soaking up damage, dying early and costing their team the game. Light tanks and tank destroyers often have to work much harder to get the same reward and even then the payoff is iffy at best. This is such an issue that "suicide" light tanks are very common, as they can run forward, spot a large amount of the enemy team (earning points for spotting) and then die, providing no further use to their team. While spotting is nice, it is rarely useful when provided in this fashion, but often more rewarding then trying to play the game tactically as a light tank.
Playing artillery requires a player to rely heavily on their team. They need front line tanks to pinpoint enemy positions, and then try to draw out or flush out tanks behind cover. Many tankers (players) don't really understand the tactics involved, as many don't enjoy playing support tanks (artillery & tank destroyers) and thus don't really understand the mechanics of them. One last, and frankly, very odd issue is the number of games that start with afk tanks. These tanks will sit as though unoccupied the entire game. Apparently this is an easy way to earn extra cash ,and not uncommon at low tiers. What I find most disturbing is the lack of a method to report players who do this, as it often leaves your team with a huge disadvantage, especially when the tank that is afk is your top tiered tank for the battle.
World of Tanks is a great game and I hope to see it continue to develop into something even more amazing. The depth and details of the tank models and the maps are downright inspiring for a free to play game. I hope more people get on board with a game that I believe will set the bar for free-to-play games.
@Kojyo I have a few points to make about your issues. Unless you spend money you can't get a heavy tank without a considerable grind. Therefore those players have earned the extra credits and xp they get. Those are also very necessary to progress once you get to those tiers. Higher tier light tanks can eran good money as well. I do agree about MM causing kamikaze scouts. There is a way(now) to report afk tanks. Keep in mind that each battle, you are teamed up with the very people you may have just fought, so there is only so much cooperation between team members. If you view this game as player first, team second, you will do better. There just isn't enough time to formulate a real strategy with 14 strangers.
@Kojyo but light tanks don't have to earn as much xp to get upgrades/new tanks as heavies do.
3 Like I've seen this advertised on the internet for months and thought it was a scam. its actually looks pretty good now that i know its a legit game.
No offense but after you've played the game a while you realise how broken it is with devs that refuse to listen to the players thelling them the matchmaking is broken. No player skill is taken into account and as a result teams of truely bad players go up against teams of really bad players with the obvious result being a loss. Not recommended at all 1/10. I suggest game reviews after a lengthy spell of play before unwitting hopefulls are lulled into this farce!
@jinx_uk lol, listen to the people who can't play bitching about their losses. listen, man, no one cares. if you suck, you suck. you don't have to blame it on the game.
I play the game, I constantly have a win rate of 66% 2 won one lost, this cannot happen if the matchmaking is totally random!
I have played around 1500 battles.
I guess the matchmaking is rather fair, ofcourse some games are just wasted because of newbies, its not often.
I think it depends a lot on your playstyle.
Try again!!
1 Like @jinx_uk Lmao someone cant play at all. I remember you. You left because you couldnt lv up fast enough. Have you played at all? No.
I,m playing this game and loving it....what a blast it can be frustrating at times when your shells have no effect on some of the high end tanks. But I guess thats realism eh! I'm even letting eve online tick over so I can play this as much as possible. I,m a big believer in playing free games but don,t mind spending occasionally just to ensure this game is profitable for the company who brought us it, to keep it evolving also. Play it and you,ll wish u discovered earlier.
@arcueid22 I think its because review comments were introduced a little after this review appeared and its a year old, so people arent watching, they're playing :)
Many issues detract from an otherwise sophisticated game that features armoured vehicles in ways that no other had.
