Preamble:
After an additional 5k hours this review again stands negativ. BuT wHY yOU kEpT pLAyinG!? - i can still make a negative review that protects interested or new players from wasting time, while still in the past having enjoyed certain aspects of the game. deal with it. i know i did...

+graphics, very very good for a f2p game, pretty much next gen
+musik, sound, very very good. very immersive. The sound department is probably gayjins most hardworking department as they change the sound of things every single update, once for the worse and the next one for the better just to make a step backwards at the following patch and so on and so on...
+best tank driving, and plane (also includes helicopters) flying sim out here. its not the most realistic one but pretty close to it most of the time and extremely and i can not underemphazise this, extremely intuitive to control, it probably has the best plane flying controls i have ever seen in a game.
+literally thousands of mostly diffrent planes, tanks, helicopters and ships to drive in this game, lots of diffrent to handle weaponry too.
+realistic damage models, it usually sucks getting hit AND damaged but you gotta hand it to them, the way they did it is pretty much better than in any other game i have seen so far, even mil sim shooters like arma got less realistic models on much fewer vehicles too. Getting damaged and surviving is an additional skill ceilling. for example: turret ring out? - cant horizontally move gun anymore, you have to do that movement with your tank or retreat and repair; the best pilots know that the sole reason they have a second wing on their plane is for spare useage! And who dafuq needs gears to land when you can lithobreak, which is much faster and more efficient!
+not a lot of p2w for a f2p-game, there still is but not a lot overall, meaning there definitly is pay to win in a few premiums more than in others but you can outskill most of the OP ones. There are enough pretty OP and unbalanced vehicles in the regular tech tree that anyone can aquire.
+one of the best concepts of combined arms gameplay, but could be even better if it werent for the many cons...
speaking of...

---Gayjin, i refuse to name them any diffrent, is one of the most greedy, toxic, incompetent, untransparent and unhonest game-companies i have ever seen in the last 10 years, holy ♥♥♥♥.
They created purposefully an extremly toxic community and gaming enviromente akin to that of league of legends but even worse. While others try to make their game enjoyable and the best experience possible, this people do exactly the opposite. They ♥♥♥♥ on your face and then laugh because they know that enough whales will pay them a good portion of their yearly income for bloated p2w content and faster progression. They divide the playerbase and sometimes (as of very late too) even straight up lie to your face. They even use confusion and retardation methodes to make people unaware of their shadowpatches/-nerfes to further ruin the experience for all players, yes even those that pay several times the value of a triple A-Title. These only get covered up because some smart people do the maths and observations.
Sometimes its even unclear if they are evil or straight up incompetent. They use self-conflicting and objectively wrong arguments to stir up a discussion/ answer a question. You can even go as far to say they dont even play their own game, some of them argued that they do, but it is obvious that they dont play the same game as we do. They dont know how to use statistics yet they havely rely on them. Apparently they dont know that statistics are entirely worthless without context.
-It is a F2P-game, so naturally expect some grind. I would find it mostly acceptable for what it is BUT, HUGE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ B.U.T: the devs try to make basically everything as painful and unrewarding as somehow possible, i refer here to their greedy aspects (this year alone there where about 4 economy nerfs, some of them even silently updated). lets compare to EAs battlefield because of the many similarites;
In BF, when you capture a point you get a constant flow of points and you dont even have to fully capture it but get a bonus on top if you do, in War Thunder you ONLY get points when you capped the point. If you did it as a team to cap the point faster you have to share the overall reward pot with all part taking players on top of that if you capped a point 99% and get killed and your team finishes the cap - you get... no points, none, 0, nada - you are worthless go back to hangar. This furthers and is a deliberate choice to make playing the objective not rewarding and make players to be as egoistic as can be.
Under the line, and out of experience i can say, if you want to get somewhere in the game you have to play very egocentric, very scummy, spawnkill, steal kills, camp a lot. Even paying for premium account do DOUPLE your income and reduce the grind by a factor of 2, progress is very slow and nowadays almost as bad as it used to be 4 years ago without premium. Teamplay is not rewarded and outside of a player created squad i would not recommend to help or trust random teammates, they will probably die and you have to do everything yourselfe anyway and if you dont carry the team probably nobody does. I know what i am talking about, i belong to the more outstanding players according to http://statistics.
-The server infrastructure is constantly breaking down and the even when they are not, expect high package loss-servers - this is not a local problem, i do not experience any of these wild problems in any other game.
-events are just another form of greed, gayjin likes to show. They are purposefully vage when it comes to the win conditions and overall got grindier every year, despite all the feedback to that being negative they progressed on their course downwards, which just shows that they arrogantly piss on us because they know that the whales will bypass the event by paying several times the worth of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ triple A-Title. yes they piss even on the paying costumers... again.
-gameplay variety, of the gamemodes is extremely stagnant or close to not being there at all. They taunt us with the same "cap 3 strategically mostly unimportant points on the map"-mode for close to a decade now. Over the years there was metric tons of feedback and suggestions, which all got ignored and not even tested. The ones that were being tested and turned out good were never implemented because they were too rewarding.
-another "missing" veriety so to speak is on the vehicles, there are thousands of them, hundreds of completly diffrent models even. But most dont get used, they are not meta, they dont fit in, they are not rewarding to play. In recent notes gayjin even nerfed specific vehicle types that dont fit the "be fast and light af"-meta even more furthering this mess.
-bugs, the game is infested by them, this is the direct consequence of the incompetence of gayjins developers, the code is a mess, the devs currently maintaining it, inherited a spagetti-mess of a code. Lets imagine the code to being a brick wall, and additional contents to be expansions to the wall or even new layers. The wall is so rigid, to add something they often push out completly unrelated stuff on the other side of the wall and to fix these holes aka bugs they take weeks for the most obvious ones, months and even years for the others. ie. fix lighting - uh oh gun firing is now bugged; added new textures - uppsy daisy sound is now buggy too.

Overall, i cannot recomment to new players, stay away from it and if you were thinking to spend money, pls dont, it just manifests and rewards the bad behaviour gayjin is showing to us, their, even often paying,costumers. oh boy...

Preamble: After an additional 5k hours this review again stands negativ. [i]BuT wHY yOU kEpT pLAyinG!?[/i] - i can still make a negative review that protects interested or new players from wasting time, while still in the past having enjoyed certain aspects of the game. deal with it. i know i did... [h1]the pros:[/h1] +[b]graphics[/b], very very good for a f2p game, pretty much next gen +[b]musik, sound[/b], very very good. very immersive. The sound department is probably gayjins most hardworking department as they change the sound of things every single update, once for the worse and the next one for the better just to make a step backwards at the following patch and so on and so on... +best tank driving, and plane (also includes helicopters) flying sim out here. its not the most realistic one but pretty close to it most of the time and extremely and i can not underemphazise this, extremely intuitive to control, it probably has the [b]best plane flying controls[/b] i have ever seen in a game. +[b]literally thousands of mostly diffrent planes, tanks, helicopters and ships[/b] to drive in this game, lots of diffrent to handle weaponry too. +[b]realistic damage models[/b], it usually sucks getting hit AND damaged but you gotta hand it to them, the way they did it is pretty much better than in any other game i have seen so far, even mil sim shooters like arma got less realistic models on much fewer vehicles too. Getting damaged and surviving is an additional skill ceilling. for example: turret ring out? - cant horizontally move gun anymore, you have to do that movement with your tank or retreat and repair; the best pilots know that the sole reason they have a second wing on their plane is for spare useage! And who dafuq needs gears to land when you can lithobreak, which is much faster and more efficient! +[b]not a lot of p2w for a f2p-game, there still is but not a lot overall[/b], meaning there definitly is pay to win in a few premiums more than in others but you can outskill most of the OP ones. There are enough pretty OP and unbalanced vehicles in the regular tech tree that anyone can aquire. +[b]one of the best concepts of combined arms gameplay[/b], but could be even better if it werent for the many cons... speaking of... [h1]the cons:[/h1] ---Gayjin, i refuse to name them any diffrent, is one of the most greedy, toxic, incompetent, untransparent and unhonest game-companies i have ever seen in the last 10 years, holy fuck. They created purposefully an extremly toxic community and gaming enviromente akin to that of league of legends but even worse. While others try to make their game enjoyable and the best experience possible, this people do exactly the opposite. They shit on your face and then laugh because they know that enough whales will pay them a good portion of their yearly income for bloated p2w content and faster progression. They divide the playerbase and sometimes (as of very late too) even straight up lie to your face. They even use confusion and retardation methodes to make people unaware of their shadowpatches/-nerfes to further ruin the experience for all players, yes even those that pay several times the value of a triple A-Title. These only get covered up because some smart people do the maths and observations. Sometimes its even unclear if they are evil or straight up incompetent. They use self-conflicting and objectively wrong arguments to stir up a discussion/ answer a question. You can even go as far to say they dont even play their own game, some of them argued that they do, but it is obvious that they dont play the same game as we do. They dont know how to use statistics yet they havely rely on them. Apparently they dont know that statistics are entirely worthless without context. -It is a F2P-game, so naturally expect some grind. I would find it mostly acceptable for what it is BUT, HUGE FUCKING B.U.T: the devs try to make basically everything as painful and unrewarding as somehow possible, i refer here to their greedy aspects (this year alone there where about 4 economy nerfs, some of them even silently updated). lets compare to EAs battlefield because of the many similarites; In BF, when you capture a point you get a constant flow of points and you dont even have to fully capture it but get a bonus on top if you do, in War Thunder you ONLY get points when you capped the point. If you did it as a team to cap the point faster you have to share the overall reward pot with all part taking players on top of that if you capped a point 99% and get killed and your team finishes the cap - you get... no points, none, 0, nada - you are worthless go back to hangar. This furthers and is a deliberate choice to make playing the objective not rewarding and make players to be as egoistic as can be. Under the line, and out of experience i can say, if you want to get somewhere in the game you have to play very egocentric, very scummy, spawnkill, steal kills, camp a lot. [b]Even paying for premium[/b] account do DOUPLE your income and reduce the grind by a factor of 2, [b]progress is very slow and nowadays[/b] almost [b]as bad as it used to be[/b] 4 years ago [b]without premium.[/b] Teamplay is not rewarded and outside of a player created squad i would not recommend to help or trust random teammates, they will probably die and you have to do everything yourselfe anyway and if you dont carry the team probably nobody does. I know what i am talking about, i belong to the more outstanding players according to [url=statistics]https://thunderskill.com/en/stat/Semthepro[/url]. -[b]The server infrastructure[/b] is constantly breaking down and the even when they are not, expect high package loss-servers - this is not a local problem, i do not experience any of these wild problems in any other game. -[b]events[/b] are just another form of greed, gayjin likes to show. They are purposefully vage when it comes to the win conditions and overall got grindier every year, despite all the feedback to that being negative they progressed on their course downwards, which just shows that they arrogantly piss on us because they know that the whales will bypass the event by paying several times the worth of a fucking triple A-Title. yes they piss even on the paying costumers... again. -[b]gameplay variety[/b], of the gamemodes is extremely stagnant or close to not being there at all. They taunt us with the same "cap 3 strategically mostly unimportant points on the map"-mode for close to a decade now. Over the years there was metric tons of feedback and suggestions, which all got ignored and not even tested. The ones that were being tested and turned out good were never implemented because they were too rewarding. -another "missing" veriety so to speak is on the vehicles, there are thousands of them, hundreds of completly diffrent models even. But most dont get used, they are not meta, they dont fit in, they are not rewarding to play. In recent notes gayjin even nerfed specific vehicle types that dont fit the "be fast and light af"-meta even more furthering this mess. -[b]bugs[/b], the game is infested by them, this is the direct consequence of the incompetence of gayjins developers, the code is a mess, the devs currently maintaining it, inherited a spagetti-mess of a code. Lets imagine the code to being a brick wall, and additional contents to be expansions to the wall or even new layers. The wall is so rigid, to add something they often push out completly unrelated stuff on the other side of the wall and to fix these holes aka bugs they take weeks for the most obvious ones, months and even years for the others. ie. fix lighting - uh oh gun firing is now bugged; added new textures - uppsy daisy sound is now buggy too. Overall, i cannot recomment to new players, stay away from it and if you were thinking to spend money, [b]pls dont[/b], it just manifests and rewards the bad behaviour gayjin is showing to us, their, even often paying,costumers. oh boy...