Pros: Plenty of tanks from different nations to unlock and customize, great graphics and special effects, great map layouts
Cons: Not a huge fan of the way spotting flags up on your HUD, point capture objective seems pointless
Gameplay: 8
Graphics: 9
Performance: 10
Overall: 9
We recently checked out the team based tank shooter MMO from Wargaming, World of Tanks, a free to play WW2 themed title that has been out for a little over 6 years. World of Tanks is a bit of a staple to the free to play genre and you'd be hard pressed to find many that have never heard of it, especially in our circles, but for all of that this reporter personally has never actually played the game! Now we have the chance.
With the client download we had the option of grabbing the standard or HD version of the game, so wanting to see the game in all its visual glory we took the larger download. Interestingly we got to a point where the patch download told us the game was playable with low tier tanks, which suited us as we didn't have any high tier tanks; unfortunately by jumping into the game it paused the download and it was only there that, after completing the tutorial, that we had to patch in full to be able to play against actual players (which was necessary as the AI training bots sucked). Sucky AI aside the tutotorials were decent enough and we quickly got to grips with the WASD controls, mouse aiming (which isn't instant, you aim and then your turret tracks to your position) and mouse click firing; there's other stuff you can do with camera controls and sniper mode, but we won't go into the details.
Ready for battle and fully patched we checked out our available vehicles in the garage; a Tier I (the lowest tier) tank for each of the playable nations, most of which lead into a larger tech tree to unlock more higher tier tanks. There were, what felt like, an overwhelming number of potential customization options with tank modifications, consumables, ammo, crew members; with not much of a tutorial to go off with this area it seemed quite daunting but we're sure that was just because it was something new. With no currency or XP to advance we glossed over these additional features and jumped straight into a random battle in our British made Vickers Medium Mk I. Hoorah the Brits!
Our first match was a 15 vs 15 team deathmatch with base capture objective (which seems to be the standard mode for games in WoT), our battleground was some wrecked town with a huge castle up on a hill to one side (which we'd later find out was a great place for long range sniper tanks to absolutely wreck us from...) All our team lined up there was little chatter or strategy flying about, presumably a bunch of other new players still figuring out how things worked, the countdown finishes and we roll out into the derelict bombed streets in search of our first kill. Visually the game is pretty stunning, for an older game the HD version is holding up pretty good and the models and environmental textures pretty well.
It didn't take long until explosion from elsewhere on the map told us our teammates had engaged in the enemy, a few seconds later and us staying too long in an open street and a few warning ricochet's off the front of our tank (thankfully it was heavily armored from the front) told us we needed to find some cover. The cover mechanics themselves are interesting, if players an enemy is spotted then they seemingly appear on the map and as a marker on your HUD letting you track their position through buildings until they are out of sight. We actually weren't a big fan of the HUG indicators as it seemed like it created too many stand off positions where both enemies knew where the other one was due to being able to see the marker through the wall, and neither wanted to act first. There's probably more to it than that, but it's what it seemed like and it took a lot of the surprise element out of combat.
Not too far into the match it started to become clear than, low tier and new player or not, some of the other players here really new what they were doing and had already found some key points on the map that we hadn't even realised you could get to. We probably engaged a little too hard and so spent a lot of time in spectator mode able to flick through our allies and see how they played and positioned; caution seems to win out most of the time unless you have the numbers for all out aggression. For a relatively simple game in both concept and mechanics, it started to become clear that there were enough nuances to separate skilled/knowledgeable players from the rest. Whilst our tank was out of commission we were able to leave the match and jump into another game (the tank in an active match was unusable though) so we tried out some different tanks; honestly we couldn't tell much of a difference as practically every engagement we came into we near enough always came worse off, it takes a little while to understand the game.
Overall the game is pretty fun, even for a noob like us, and whilst there were the same few maps in rotation for our Tier, which could feel like a bit of a grind for any extensive play time, we do think it's also beneficial not to have too many maps in rotation early on and instead letting players learn how the maps, game and tanks actually work. Our biggest drawback of the game, and this may only be at lower level/tier, is that it felt like every game became a team deathmatch and no one ever really went for the point capture objective; the only time you ever saw anyone move for it was when the other team was pretty much dead already and taking it didn't even seem worth it. Other than that it does feel like World of Tanks offers some pretty exciting gameplay and a nice spin on the shooter genre of which we're so accustomed to.
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