Lately I've been playing World of Tanks. It always impresses me just how active their online marketing is, heck, if you look at my google adverts bar you've got a reasonable chance of seeing a link to it.
Of course that can be a double edged sword, 90% of the games you see advertised this way are tosh, so people make the initial assumption that this carries through to WoT.
I wont say this couldn't be further from the truth, but WoT is definately fun. At it heart it's actually quite a basic game, you and 14 other people in their WW2 tanks vs 15 other tankers in a fairly diverse mix of maps as you attempt to either defeat the opposing team or capture their base. That's it.
In truth we could do with some more game modes.
Anyway the real meat of it is that if your computer can run the high-fidelity settings then World of Tanks really does look excellent, you can tell that a mountain of work has gone into making the vehicles in this game look and operate in as real to life as they possibly can. It also works on the free to play model used by many Korean online games, where they make their money not in a monthly subscription, but rather through premium microtransactions - and from a purely business perspective I have to admire how tempting they make them without actually gimping a players ability to win and enjoy the game.
The microtransaction medium involves the purchase of a in-game currency simply called gold for real money and with this gold you can do a variety of things. A premium account increases the money and research you receive in battle by around 50% which makes it easier to level up and get thos bigger and better tanks but only lasts for a certain amount of time, gold can also be transferred into cash, and is used to convert a fully researched tanks left over research into a communal pool, lastly it can also be used to by special premium tanks. Some of these tanks come from factions not currently supported in the game such as land lease british tanks, or captured French Tanks such as the Somua S35. These vehicles also come with a 50% boost to cash earned.
There are niggles with the game though. Ever since it went live for some reason the servers seem incapable of running 30 people online at once without lagging, this has been a consistent problem as well. Then there's the infamous issue of the invisible tank problem where a bugged, or possibly just plain badly thought out spotting system allows tanks to dissapear from plain sight like magic. There's also some bugged issues involving armour that the WoT team are being sluggish with rectifying. Also, although it's been promised, the game needs an easier way of reporting bad behaviour ingame, as is the responsibility falls to the person being griefed or insulted to provide the burden of proof and make the extra effort to contact the support team in order for anything to get done. This basically ensures that the malcontent in question will get away unreported simply because it's such a faff. This is one of those things that should have been fixed BEFORE going live but didn't. It's quite clear that the WoT teams priority is including as many tanks as possible over gameplay balance or bug fixing, which from one point of view is okay, since tanks are the main draw here, but a little bit better customer service would be nice.
So, is World of Tanks worth a play? Yes. Has there never been a better time to start playing World of Tanks now that it's gone live? No, that would be a few months back when you got free gold at the start of every day during the open beta phase. But you missed that boat.
Basically, I reccommend giving it a go, and when you get bored of it, wait for them to add something new (American Tank Destroyers and the French Faction is apparently being worked on) and come back to it then.
I mean come on, it's free.
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