What’s not to love about tanks? They’re big. They’re rock hard. And they’re great for a quick hit of destruction. World of Tanks is a free-to-play MMO in which gamers command World War II vehicles in large online tactical battles. Annihilation is the name of the game and it’s something you’ll see an awful lot of in WoT!
Although the game comes as a small initial download, 70MB in fact, as soon as you load up you get quickly hit with a rather sizeable pack download. Even on a decent connection, this still took over half an hour to grab and so if you’re reading this (which you obviously are!), be sure to load up and launch the game a little while before you actually want to play. Thankfully once this has landed you’ll be up-to-date with all the latest goodies you need to jump into a game and take on the world.
Taking command of some of history’s most powerful tanks is no laughing matter though. You start off on the bottom rung, in a small lightweight tank (you get the choice of two but both are rather rubbish), and alongside your 14 other teammates, you need to take down the enemy any way you can. Of course, in a tank, you only have one way of destroying the other side…...shooting them, and for the first few match ups this does prove to be rather troublesome. The controls are simple enough and the addition of an auto aim somewhat ruins the full-on experience a tad, but in those first few matches, you’ll find yourself up against far superior combat machines and will quickly find yourself being destroyed, needing to sit out and wait for the match to end. Each game pits two teams of 15 players against each other and this lasts for 15 minutes or ends as soon as one team has been decimated. After numerous encounters, I’ve yet to see a match last the full distance, so even if you do get taken out early, you don’t need to wait too long before reaping the rewards and finding yourself another match.
It seems that a major gameplay tactic is to just hide behind a rock with your turret sticking out, firing shots at anyone who passes. You can’t exactly ‘hide’ from the enemy as each tank has a big green or red (depending on your side) diamond above them but sticking yourself up against the rocky scenery at least means you can only be destroyed from a couple of directions.
Lack of speed, firepower and brute strength is quickly noticeable, especially when up against those who have already thrown many an hour into their vehicles. As such, upgrading to a bigger tank can’t come soon enough. To do this you need to earn yourself some cash and this is done by taking part in battles and by spotting and/or taking down enemies. Earn enough and you can grab yourself the latest gear for your current machine, or perhaps you’ll decide to ditch the small ones entirely for something a bit bigger, a bit badder, a bit better.
The whole game revolves around filling your garage with enough weaponry to start a small war (funny that), but in the end you’ll no doubt find yourself going back to the bigger, stronger vehicles instead of switching and swapping between your full arsenal.
At time of writing, and we need to remember this is a beta product, network connections issues are fairly frequent things. ‘The server may be unavailable or your network connection settings may be wrong’ seems to be the statement of choice here, even if your connections are fine for all other games. It’s therefore very hit and miss whether you get connected or whether you are left sitting around getting frustrated. This is sure to be fixed once the game comes out of beta testing though.
And finally we get onto the microtransactions. As a free-to-play game, these are fully expected but maybe not quite as prominently as they are. The in-game currency can be bought from the Xbox Live Marketplace (or it can be once it works!), and any tank upgrade or skin customisation can be purchased either as a permanent fixture or for just 7/30 days instead, the price changing to reflect the amount of time you wish to have it for. You can also buy extra gold or premium accounts which give you extra bonuses and experience points. With a store ‘coming soon’, it’s a bit of a cash-cow to be honest and I think I’d rather pay for the game out front, rather than see so many of these horrid micro transactions attempting to pinch our money.
All-in-all, the beta is fairly basic. It doesn’t grab your attention for an awfully long time and each battle eventually pans out like a sniper match on Battlefield or COD. There is a feeling that until all store, statistics and relevant options are open in the full game, you won’t see the full effect of certain actions. By all means get involved in the beta and see how you get on with the game, but it's most definately only in the average category at best.
World of Tanks will see you blown away, just not in the way you’d like!
