I’m gliding through the sky. Bullets flying at me from enemy planes. I turn my plane and spiral down the ground pulling up at the last second to evade my enemy. As I fly above the trees I feel safer. But it doesn’t last long. In the distance I see anti aircraft machines turning towards me and they fire.
There isn’t a storyline as such to the game. However, in realistic mode you fight in historical battles from the 2ndWorld War all the way up to the 20th century. The battles can have fighters from seven different countries including: USA, Germany, USSR, Britain, Japan, France and Italy. Every country has vehicles in aviation. However Italy doesn’t have vehicles in Army.
There are over 1,000 vehicles in total across the Naval, Army and Aviation. Each vehicle also comes with detailed information about it’s history such as how many were produced, their most notable drivers and the year they were produced. I really like that each have their profiles because you not only play the game but you can learn about the vehicles from each country available.
On the Xbox One there are some early access packs that allow the use of naval battles. In the basic early access pack you get access to Aviation and Army vehicles. I really enjoyed each battle system that I had access to and I can not wait to try out the naval fleets that WarThunder has to offer.
Aviation can be really hard. If you angle your screen wrong it is hard to get back to a good angle before you crash. I found it very difficult to take down enemies. However this one is so much fun. I loved flying fast past the enemies and spinning to dodge their bullets.
Much easier than Aviation and just as fun. You have points to capture on the ground and a lot of tanks to fight against. On the land you have already war torn towns but there are some destructible elements around them. I would have liked the houses to be destructible but even just the walls around town were really cool.
There are two main game modes which you can choose between. The easier of the two is arcade battles. In this mode you don’t have to refuel and you can add more vehicles to your roster so if you die you can revive and use a different vehicle. Realistic battles are much more complicated because you have to refuel your vehicle and they have realistic weaknesses. For example, if you are going too fast in a plane your wing could be ripped off.
I would like a really immersive battle where one minute I could be flying a plane then landing to get into a tank and help save some of my team mates on the ground. I think it would be really cool if you could make a character that can get in and out of vehicles to really switch up the fight. You could also potentially land of a naval ship with a landing strip and then control a naval vehicle.
As the game is in early access I would love to see what changes are made and how the developers improve the game. One thing I would like changing is the user interface. It is designed for the PC so isn’t very console friendly.
Overall I enjoyed the learning curve that I went through playing War Thunder. I was struggling to start out especially in the aviation vehicles but once I was getting the hang of it it became incredibly fun. I can not wait to see where the game goes and what vehicles could be added. I really liked the maps because they had a lot of open fields but also had various sized villages so it looked populated and made it feel much more realistic.
GameCritUK 