The Good: Free to download, great tutorial, easy to learn controls, great servers, really fun gameplay, pristine environments, realistic and enjoyable physics, cool upgrades and tanks at your disposal.
The Bad: Requires payment for the better upgrades, really long starting time, no respawning can lead to annoyances, not very addicting or engrossing.
About a month ago, I was on ProJared’s YouTube channel and I saw this video called “World of Tanks: World of Hurt”. During this, I thought to myself, “Hey! That looks pretty cool!” And when he said it was free to download, I was ready to get it. So know I have the game and I’m here to review it. And that’s how life works out.
For those of you who don’t know, World of Tanks is a team based MOBA using nothing but tanks. You travel in tanks, you fight people in tanks, you die in tanks. Think of it like the Battlefield games but always online and with tanks. And it’s good. I have fun with this game.
After you download the game, you go through this eight minute tutorial on how to control your tank. I think this tutorial is great. It’s very descriptive and really shows you the ropes in an easy to learn way. This also helps the fact that this game is very easy to get into. This game doesn’t through any snag balls at you to trip you up. It has controls that are easy to adapt to and what your tank does take no time to learn. I also like the fact that it takes time to become a master at it. It requires practice to use your tank. That is a nice touch.
Like I said earlier, this game is always online, but unlike Diablo 3 or SimCity, this isn’t a bad thing. The servers are excellent. They have great connectivity and it takes you a short time to get hooked up into a battle. I love the servers so much.
Now I must talk about the selling point about this game; the fights. They are awesome! They always play out differently, the controls are great, the environments look pristine, they are exciting and intense, the physics are realistic yet entertaining to discover what your tank can and cannot do. It’s all awesome! Even your tank knocking down trees and posts and stuff is great! These are all that what make a great MOBA.
What I like about the tanks is that you start out getting seven. Each one has different attributes and they all seem really balanced in battle. Plus, you can make upgrades on them! You can improve their gun, their armor, their speed, whatever! It gives a feeling of accomplishment once these upgrades are made and I like that.
Now despite all that, there are some negatives that I have to address. You know how earlier I said that this game was free to download? Well, if you continue to play free to play, you won’t get any of the good stuff. You won’t get extra slots to have more tanks, you won’t get new tanks, you won’t get new upgrades for those tanks, you won’t get gold, and you won’t be able to turn your gold into experience points. This bugs me. For a free to play game, it pretty much requires you to fork over cash to get good at the game. And if you never do this, you will never feel like you’re improving. There will always be people who have paid for all these things who will destroy your tank easily with you hardly able to do anything about it. I can understand that this company needs to get money, but if that’s getting in the way of you getting more skilled at the game, I think it’s not worth it.
As much as I love the battles, there are a couple of problems I have with it. For starters is… well… the start time (yeah, that was terrible). Once you start every battle, you have to go through a thirty second start time. That means thirty seconds of waiting for everybody to connect. That means no shooting and no moving whatsoever. This moment of the game is necessary, but they could shorten it to ten seconds. Thirty seconds it too long and can lead to increased anxiety on starting the match.
Not only that, but once you die, you are out. There is no respawning in this game. On the plus side, you have multiple tanks so while that battle is still going on, you can enter another battle with the different tank. However, this can lead to a lot of cheap deaths and a feeling that there’s no progress to your skills being made. Combine this with the long starting time and you’ve got quite an annoyance on your side.
Even though I have all those complaints, I still enjoy this game. It may not be the most addicting or engrossing game out there, it’s quite fun and is worth the download. And besides, you control a tank. That in itself is awesome.