World of Tanks is an unusual game. When you start it up, and it gives you a start tank, and you press the big red 'battle' button, second later you are on a map with 14 other tanks on your team, against 15 enemies. There's a time of 10 or 15 minutes ticking down, depending on the type of battle the game randomly selects. A message says 'capture enemy base or destroy all enemies'.
The controls are pretty intuitive, mouse looks around, w/a/s/d move and turn, left click shoots. Soon the battle is over, and you're returned to the 'garage' screen with the menu and your list of tanks, and a message saying you got some experience and credits. OK, what now? Most games provide hours of gameplay - that's a nice intro. Well, get ready to repeat that thousands of times - that's the game.
Now, that sounds bad and limited - what the heck, just the same 15 against 15 over and over and over? Well, yes, but for one thing there are a couple dozen different maps - more are added several times a year - and it's a lot more fun than it sounds.
You get to know the maps, and look for good spots. Different teams have different amounts of teamwork - which helps win if they do it. Every normal game sticks you among 15 random people - though you can have one friend (free) or two friends (if you buy 'premium') join you as a small platoon in the team of 15 each match. There are 10 tiers of tanks; you can get bigger and bigger tanks to play as you save the credits you get.
The most notable two things about the game for me are the very realistic/detailed graphics in the battles, which are varied settings from bombed out ruins of towns to desert dunes to mountain passes; and the excellent and varied music. They have several songs that play, and I don't like 'march music' but every one of the songs is surprisingly good and helps the atmosphere.
There are five types of tanks. The 'heavy' is what most think of in a tank - larger slower, fine gun. The mediums are the more agile battle tanks, able to circle and shoot larger enemies, to go quickly. The 'Tank Destroyer' is a tank designed more for hiding and ambushing, with a strong gun and front armor generally, usually for staying back and supporting the other tanks. The light tanks are mostly used as scouts, fast and small and able to hide well, exposing the enemy and zig zagging to not get shot in the enemy's area - and looking to try to find and kill the last and most distinct type of tank, artillery, which has the most damaging guns, the least armor, and a special 'satellite' view of the map where they look down on the enemy and send long range shots. The variety of tanks helps the game not get as repetitive.
There are different countries' lines of tanks, with the same types but variations in the actual tanks; there are favorites in each and almost everyone gets tanks from each country.
There are three game currencies. Gold is the one that costs money; experience and credits you get automatically each battle, the more damage you do, the more you get (damage is counted, not kills, for rewards). The game has a somewhat confusing interface; experience is the currency for 'researching' new tanks and equipment like better guns (you start with tier 1, which then researches tier 2, and so on); after researching, you need to buy the item with credits (you can sell back what you buy for 50% of the cost). Playing the free game, you make the most rewards around tier 5 and 6; the game has you lose money playing higher tiers, in order to keep the game being dominated by high tier tanks.
Gold is used for a variety of things: premium, which the main benefit of is getting more experience and credits in the battle (it works about to about twice as much); you can also buy 'premium' consumable add-ons for the tanks, and paint jobs that don't affect gameplay, resources like spots for more tanks and reserved crew members, and a few other things (like paying to remove an item you put on a tank to move it to another tank).
Premium accounts can be bought from one day to one year (costing $100+ approximately).
The most useful purchase I find for gold along with premium is 'training'. Crew members are trained, first for the main role - like gunner - and then with more skills, such as beign able to turn the tank faster or drive faster over soft ground or radio locations of enemies further. As you get new tanks, you likely want to move crews to the new tanks - but that needs retraining, and if you don't pay, some of the training is lost each time.
There are also a limited number of 'premium tanks', which play about the same as other tanks of their tier, but receive more credits by having lower 'repair costs', making it easier to get credits to buy other tanks. The best of these cost just over $50, as a one-time expense. The benefits are cumulative with a 'premium account'.
The gameplay varies between four types: standard, where two teams start at a flag on sides of a map and want to capture the other team's flag or destroy all their tanks; encounter, which is similar but has one map in the middle; and assault, which has the attacker and the defense, where one team tries to capture the flag of the other team, and the other team is on defense instead of trying to capture.
There are a vareity of 'medals' in the game, for things from killing six tanks in a battle to hitting numbers of total damage done in all battle, and some varied objectives as well, such as ramming a higher tank to kill it.
The game's group structure are 'clans'; clans offer a chat room and another type of gameplay, 'clan wars', and a few clans who win the most 'control lands on a map' and get some gold. This is the main gameplay where players use special ammunition that costs about 50 cents per 15 minute match, that increases the chances of penetratint enemy armor.
The game is designed by a very entrepeneurial East European company, that's very fast growing (I read tens of dollars a month income), and they are developing two more similar games for warplanes and warships. They make an effort to keep enhancing the game, and provide varied information such as history articles on tank battles, and regular specials.
The game is in some ways historically designed to be like actual tanks; for example, the paint jobs are only ones used on period tanks; on others, it's not, such as how tanks have the 'light up' to spot them, and the artillery overhead view, and the way the crews get out and fix damage in a few seconds.
Time for a few negatives. One, I find the user interface is often user unfriendly. Sometimes confusing, sometimes inefficient, and sometimes even causing players to make mistakes that can cost money. They also don't seem especially receptive to improving these things, though they do occassionally (and sometimes make them worse, removing features players like).
I also find the customer service mixed and sometimes poor. Until recently, the 'chat room' moderation has been by volunteers, who provided very uneven moderation. Mostly not a problem, but sometimes they'd not take action when they should, and others they'd take it with little basis - and the room goes for hours without moderation. When they take action, it suspends the player from having any communication sent anywhere in the game for the duration of from six hours to multiple weeks, including in battles. So your clan might be counting on you for a clan war that night, and you don't be able to chat with them, even to tell them what happened, unless you can contact them outside the game. If you lose playing premium time you paid for - too bad. For example, one night in chat I saw one player say inappropriate things, and the moderator banned him for three days - and a kid who had done nothing wrong, but have his messages next to the other person, appearing that the moderator had mistaken who said what. Players said this, and the moderator said 'don't discuss moderator actions' and that would get a ban, too.
Also, when the game makes a player waste gold by mistake, customer service has been totally unwilling to provide any credits. For example, when you get a new tank, and move the old crew into it, you have to re-train the new crew, so you bring the members up, and click the training tab, and options for training. No problem - except that the default for which tank thye're training for, which is easy to miss, is set to the OLD tank, not the new tank they're in. There's no reason to have it that way - no one ever moves a crew into a tank and then trains them for the tank they were in previously, but that's what happens if you aren't careful to notice it every time for every member. Contact support if you accidentally waste gold and they'll tell you the policy is no refunds for any mistakes, no matter how much a poor interface contributed. I've been quite unhappy with the service at times; response time has ranged from about an hour to a couple days.
Players often complain about a couple things. One is the 'matchmaker' - most matches start with one or more complaints - that's the game picking the teams to be about even. Lower tanks don't like being in matches with higher tanks they can't kill. Another is 'lag', that's periodic for various reasons. But the lag isn't that common enough to be a major issue. The other major area players, especially newer players, complain is about how the 'camoglouge' game system works, where ou find your tank being shot by enemies you can't spot. The game a system that can't easily be described in a review for how tanks spot each other, from equipment and training to hiding correctly beind bushes. It's part of learning the game.
(Update: as of the 7.
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