War Thunder is a free to play combat flight sim set in 2nd World War that is under continuous development. There are several countries and many different airplanes to pick from and you can play online or single player missions, though the online component is at the core of the game and you will need an online connection.
Free to play of course means that that you constantly come across content you are offered to pay real money for. It is annoying, but most things can still be earned by “grinding” for experience points, as some gamers put it, but in less hostile terms it simply means playing the game.
There is a lot of complaint that since the latest patch was introduced the grinding has become a lot harder, even if you pay to receive double the amount of experience points, but to a new player like me the current level seems acceptable for an online MMO. Basically, the problem appears if you want to have a specific aircraft. If you want to fly on one the German jets from the late part of the war then you have a problem because it is one of the last unloackable airplanes in the game and you will play this game your entire life to get it.
I was more unhappy with the games’ confusing mechanics. The game has a main currency, then there is a 2nd type of game’s currency, there are experience points you get during combat and there are secondary experience points. Experience points are used to research new airplanes and upgrades for them, but then you can also convert the secondary experience points with the game’s currency to speed up the research.
When you play the game online you can bring multiple planes with you into battle so that when one gets shot down you pick the next one (like having multiple lives), but when you research an airplane, as a rule, you can only have one of that type (there are exceptions) so you always end up stuck with older models, which is really weird.
There is a giant "to battle" button on the start menu, clicking which quickly puts you in some random match, but if you want to have more choice then hidden away in the menu are the other options. There are “custom missions” which are just standard online sessions, the fuller servers have about 10 to 15 players. Are they the same as the aforementioned quick battle? Doesn’t seem that way… Then there are “single missions” that get unlocked as you progress in the game. They are just single player scenarios with AI opponents, but a cooperative mode is possible…somehow? Then there is a dynamic campaign which has more single player missions where you seem to be able to customize the conditions of the battle a little bit., but “dynamic” indicated that the game also changes it…somehow?
All of this is aforementioned stuff spread across different menus, some of which require glasses to see. This must be what players of modern MMO games have to deal with every day, but for flight enthusiasts the confusing system may be a new type of headache. When you mouse over menu items you will get some information, but it is not sufficient. Really you have to start this game by reading a manual for a few hours.
Although its menus may be convoluted, once you free yourself from them and get into battle, in its arcade form, War Thunder is a lot of fun. The control of the airplane with the mouse is smooth and you start wondering why they don’t apply this system to real airplanes because it flies great. The missions can vary, but I found that online most missions consist of each side trying to prevent the other from destroying its ground units. In certain missions you can also capture bases and airfields. If you get onto a map with rocky terrain then you start having some fun strategic depth to the game as you try to sneak around in the valleys or high above the clouds.
In single player the AI has average competence. It is nice how the AI mates from your squadron fly with you in formation and the battles are nice and chaotic dogfights, but on the other hand you also see that the AI tends to fly into the ground a lot and the way the AI planes fight with one another sometimes looks strange and uneventful. AI fulfills its purpose though, giving you a hard time but not so hard that you feel cheated.
On top of that the game looks good and performs smooth. The ground texture has low resolution when you are on the ground, but once you take off everything is nice and sharp with visibility for miles. I set most settings to maximum and had good frame rate so far.
However, as good as the arcade version of this game is, if you are a sim fan you are out of luck at the moment. The game has a “realism” setting for battles, but the controls for joysticks at the moment are broken. There is a wobble when you try to center your airplane, there is a problem with the roll sensitivity always being on maximum, the airplane often refuses to pitch down (though this may be a realism thing), rudder pedals have to be set up manually in the game’s configuration files and sometimes the pedals don’t get recognized, etc. Because of this I have not even tried the realistic battles yet, but I hear it is very hard to find one.
If they fix the joystick controls, this game could be the user-friendly modern version of Il-2 Sturmovik, which would be great. There is however an equal possibility that the whole thing will get screwed up. It’s always a risk with a game that is under development. Quite a bit of the content is still missing and what is present can change with the next patch. Players should be mindful of investing a lot of time and money into a product that is still being constructed.
The good thing about War Thunder is that it is free, so if you don’t like it you can always stop without any loss to your wallet.