War Thunder

Screw this game and ♥♥♥♥ Gaijin. Over the years of playing this game even before it got on Steam, I've witnessed it turn from a fun, original, semi-realistic military experience into a pathetic cash grab and LARPer nest. Gaijin keeps caring less and less for their customers, as is visible with their constant "updates" which only feature premium vehicles with AT MOST two newly modeled vehicles. They keep adding uninteresting garbage that only serves to wring your wallet dry while making you regret your purchase after playing a couple battles, only to realize you cannot refund your purchase. The game is, at this point, 90% focused on premium vehicles at minimum. What the ♥♥♥♥ happened to "We don't want our players to buy their way to the top"??? Do you want to start playing War Thunder? Don't. Do you want to return to War Thunder? Don't. Do you want to grind tech trees? DON'T. It is literally impossible to progress in this game without the help of a premium account or vehicle, both of which are NOT cheap. You'd have to be unbelievably skilled to get a satisfactory amount of research points to progress in the tech tree. Having spent 3 months trying to research my way to the T-90M, I can say with total certainty that I do not feel even the slightest touch of pride after finally finishing researching it. The gameplay loop makes you want to shave with a cactus after 5-6 battles. Spawn, get your gunner knocked out by a random asshat shooting you in a bush with 40 bush decals he bought with his hard-earned money pumping out septic tanks all week, die, respawn, the same thing happens, run out of spawn points, ragequit. That's it. You're extremely lucky if you can exit out of a battle with more than 5 kills. Not to mention CAS at higher battle ratings, holy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥. You love the feeling of being blown out like a candle by some knob flying 20 kilometers away from the battlefield while you can only watch his replay of his little rinky-dink jet which is definitely premium as you fight the urge to pulverize your keyboard and monitor? Me neither. All in all, ♥♥♥♥ this game and ♥♥♥♥ Gaijin. I hope they realize how deep of a hole of ♥♥♥♥ they've dug for themselves when they realize nobody will be buying their stupid overpriced vehicles anymore. Not to mention they're starting to include ANIME GOONER SKINS. IN A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ WAR SIMULATOR. ARE YOU SERIOUS??? I am never downloading this game again. Full stop.

I cannot recommend this game due to how the developers treat their own player base. Instead of fixing core issues and listening to player feedback, the company recently updated their official Code of Conduct to threaten players with in-game bans if they participate in "review bombing" or leave coordinated negative feedback. Trying to silence honest customer frustration by holding player accounts hostage is incredibly anti-consumer and grimy behavior. To make matters worse, their customer support is notoriously unhelpful. If your account gets compromised or hacked, do not expect them to help you fix it. They refuse to issue refunds or reverse fraudulent charges made by account intruders, leaving players completely unprotected even after spending hard-earned money on this game. The gameplay itself doesn't matter when the company behind it shows zero respect for its community's security or freedom of speech. Save your time and your wallet. What makes this lack of account protection terrifying is the sheer amount of money the company expects you to spend. The game has devolved into a frustrating, hyper-monetized grind designed to pressure you into buying $60–$70 premium vehicle packs just to progress at a reasonable pace. Instead of building a safe environment for paying customers, they use predatory systems like limited-time auctions to trigger FOMO (fear of missing out) and aggressively drain your wallet. Furthermore, the player progression mechanics are fundamentally broken. The matchmaking algorithms consistently force players into "up tiered" matches where they face vastly superior vehicles they have no realistic chance of defeating. The developers choose to ignore these glaring balancing flaws, leaving the core gameplay a miserable experience for anyone who refuses to constantly swipe their credit card. To top it off, former community managers have publicly blown the whistle on the company's internal practices, exposing that they actively attempt to manipulate their Steam review scores behind the scenes. They are trying to manufacture a positive image while actively silencing real players who complain about data security and unfair treatment. Under federal consumer protection standards like the Consumer Review Fairness Act it is fundamentally illegal for a company to threaten or penalize people for posting honest reviews. By forcing a rule into their terms that holds your game access hostage for criticizing them, they are blatantly trying to bypass basic consumer rights. A company shouldn't be allowed to hide its flaws by legally bullying its own community. ban me for this gaijin and i promise i will sue the absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ out of you i am beyond done playing games with your company and you slime ball ♥♥♥♥♥.

this game is not free your soul is the price i still suffer from this hell please dont download this ♥♥♥♥ it will make you a slave

The best way I've ever seen this game put is this: "War Thunder is the best game, ran by the worst company." I'll start with the pros first, as this game is at its core a groundbreaking and fun experience. - The sheer selection and representation of military history in this game is its biggest strength, as it has thousands of vehicles for the player to play and an amazing attention to detail for how they are in real life (usually). - The skill ceiling in this game is phenomenally high, as there are so many ways to get better at the game and so much information to know that you never truly master it all (positions on every map, recognizing vehicles from a passing glance and their exact module performance vs how it compares to yours, weak spots and armor holes, etc...). - The game is well performing and visually stunning with a massive player base, which help it immensely in terms of making the experience more enjoyable. Now, that's where the token positives end and the actual gameplay/publisher needs to be dissected. - Gaijin, the creator and maintainer of War Thunder, is an absolute vile company. Completely ignoring their real life politics, their ties to War Thunder is easily the worst part of the game. They do not care about their players and actively make decisions almost EXCLUSIVELY to spite or harm them. They will ban accounts on the basis of review bombing which is entirely arbitrary and exists to hold a sword over the head of players who want to feel heard. Their support system is also nonexistent, even actively hostile to players. The monetization and laziness of the game are also just gross, and warrant bullet points of their own. - This game exists as a cash cow for a company that has no comparable income source. Gaijin monetizes this game so obsessively that user enjoyment is almost contingent on pulling out your credit card. The ever-present grind almost mandates the purchasing of premium vehicles or months of a premium account just to play your beloved Abrams or T90. Keep in mind, these are not some $5 purchase you make flippantly, many of the vehicles in this game cost as much as an ENTIRELY NEW AAA GAME, with an absolutely hilarious $70 price tag (that I am indeed seeing on my screen as I type this review, for Senrai Maiden packs, sigh). On top of that, most truly unique and fun vehicles exist as event vehicles that will never be coming back and often fetch for hundreds of dollars on the marketplace. It is scummy to its core and makes the gap between the f2p and the whale almost insurmountable. In addition to this, they make $70 vehicles utterly unbalanced for months at a time after release so that they can milk the player base eating itself from the inside out for a little while. BMPT-72 on launch made the game unplayable, T58 on launch made the game unplayable, and this only extends backwards in time. - Gaijin is lazy in how they fix poorly designed mechanics in this game, and it only gets worse. Many mechanics are foundationally broken and directly impact gameplay every single match, yet remain unchanged as Gaijin knows they have the player count and influence to not lift a finger. Volumetric armor making rounds disappear into thin air when it hits a 5mm steel plate? Ship it. Missiles with enough filler in the warhead to turn your tank to rapidly expanding plasma just ricocheting off a steel sheet because it was angled? Ship it. Artillery guns being used as frontline assault vehicles that can either insta-kill any tank in the game or fail to make a dent with 12kg TNT equivalent? Ship it. Every single engagement in this game is a coin flip, and it's tiring knowing your enemy who you played better than wins because the game decides your dart round going 1200 m/s gets eaten by a mudguard. - Gaijin also does not care about making the experience unique between tech trees. Count the amount of Leopards in the game and you'll see what I mean. The copy/paste problem is so genuinely infuriating because Gaijin can make a major update for the game and add a new subtree with only one actually new vehicle (Greek subtrees, anyone?). Or, as a matter of fact, just take the entire Israeli tech tree. Five. Hundred. Magachs. The worst part is that Gaijin is NOT running out of vehicles to add from real life, they just don't CARE enough to make the gameplay unique. - The grind is so overwhelming that without a premium account plus a lineup of premium vehicles it takes months to make even a dent. Modern vehicles at high ranks are so outrageously expensive that it will take weeks for a f2p player to research them, and that's assuming they can even afford the damn thing because at high ranks they probably LOSE silver lions on an average match. I have 600 hours as of making this review, and I'm at ~300/2000 vehicles needed for the collector Steam achievement. - With how the damage models work in this game, War Thunder goes from the most to the least realistic military combat sim ever made. You can shoot an artillery shell or ATGM with enough explosive filler to LEVEL. A. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. BUILDING. at a light tank and you'll get a broken MG/transmission. However, you can also shoot the ground next to a tank and it aimbot ricochets into their ammo at the perfect angle defying physics. Realistically, I want my results to be based on an aggregate of my positioning, skill, and vehicle matchup. What I get is that I'll get 12 kill games because APFSDS rounds will ricochet off my TAM or get 0 kill games because I get the inverse experience. Every battle is a coin flip, and it's exhausting. - Map design is abhorrently balanced, and encourages spawn camping on almost every single map. If you play for more than 5 matches you are guaranteed to have a match where your entire team gets spawn camped by minute 3, and that you just have no ability to fight back. Spawn camping is so prevalent that from my experience >85% of matches end in it, and >40% of them experience spawn camping before the match is even half over. Gaijin has no intent to change this either; the newly added Darwin Hill map is just a spawn camper's paradise and abysmal to play (for reference: at one point I got killed by a Merkava near his spawn, I respawned and within 5 seconds killed him back, from over 1.5km away). - The community is so genuinely toxic and the moderation is almost non-existent, as to where playing with chat off is nearly a requirement. Every third game you have someone spewing slurs and the vilest hate speech you can imagine in chat either because they're mad or because they were bored. Gameplay is also very toxic as people will camp 24/7 and killing anyone is a dice roll of whether they'll just respawn in a plane, revenge bomb you, and kamikaze into the dirt because I guess you're not allowed to have fun. - Some other things that don't warrant bullet points of their own but are worth mentioning: shooting rounds and dying costs you currency that you CAN go net negative on per match, premium currency just does not exist for f2p EVER, the game becomes a repair simulator for 40 second increments, bushes are p2w and just make the f2p grind less fun, Senrai Maidens and goon slop exist just to drive up sales, CAS has severe balancing issues and you WILL die repeatedly from something you had absolutely no control over, non-premium vehicles come stock and are made to be as unusable and unfun as possible (especially top tier) I give this review as someone who plays almost exclusively ground battles and bounces between tech trees but predominantly plays Germany (all tech tree vehicles done up to rank 7). Alongside this, I have several friends with thousands more hours than me, I have an unhealthy obsession with watching War Thunder content online, and I sometimes read forum/reddit posts of user experience on this game. This is all to say: I do not have the experience of someone with thousands of hours, but I have well enough experience and knowledge to say the things I have here.