Heavy Metal and Sluggish Control Inputs
Controls tell you everything about a combat game within the first sixty seconds. War Thunder puts you in the cockpit or behind the turret of heavy military machines, so steering naturally carries huge inertia. Steering an early tank feels like dragging a cinder block through wet cement. Turrets rotate at a crawl, engine revs take full seconds to spool up, and mouse aiming always has to wait on the physical gun barrel catching up to your reticle. That makes sense for realism, but it completely removes any snappy reflex play from close-quarters skirmishes.
When an enemy rolls around an urban street corner, twitch reactions do not save you. You cannot snap-aim or dodge once an engagement starts. Every micro-adjustment requires patience while the suspension settles, which turns street fighting into an agonizing waiting game. Flying feels somewhat more fluid since mouse aim actively trims your rudder and ailerons, yet you still run straight into heavy control locks during high-speed dives. Full English voice callouts and clean English interface menus keep the basic tactical chatter easy to track, but the actual hands-on movement remains stubborn and stiff across every tier.
Ruthless Hitboxes and Internal Component Armor
The damage system gives the combat real bite. There is no shared health bar to whittle down. Shells strike armor plates, calculate angles, punch through steel, and explode inside crew compartments. Gaijin built detailed internal layouts for thousands of vehicles. One clean shot can shatter a gun breech, knock out the loader, or detonate an ammo rack in an instant.
That focus on precise geometry cuts both ways. Hitting an enemy right on their driver hatch feels genuinely sharp when the internal damage camera shows shrapnel tearing through the cabin. But micro-angles cause massive headaches. A shell striking two inches to the left can bounce off an invisible ridge or get completely absorbed by an enemy track wheel without scratching the hull. You end up trading shots where lethal hits turn into zero-damage duds because a track hitbox swallowed a high-caliber round whole. It is deeply calculated, yet wildly inconsistent during fast-moving brawls.
Massive Maps Marred by Spawn Sniping
Combat plays out across huge historical battlegrounds, spanning rolling fields, desert dunes, and bombed-out factories. With aircraft diving on ground targets while tanks scrap over capture zones, the scale sounds incredible on paper. In practice, long transit times kill the pacing. You spawn in, drive in a straight line for three full minutes, and then get vaporized by an invisible sniper parked behind a ridgeline two kilometers away.
Combined arms battles suffer from huge visibility issues. High-tier air strikes wipe out armored pushes before anyone on the ground has a fighting chance to aim an anti-aircraft gun. Once a team secures the high ground on a map, they simply lock down the enemy spawn exits. Dying after a five-minute crawl only to immediately take a high-velocity shell through your engine block right as you load in is pure frustration.
The Relentless Free-to-Play Wall
Underneath all the historical hardware sits a grueling grind. Post-match rewards trickle in slowly to unlock new vehicles and equipment, and bad rounds drain your funds instead of moving you forward. Pushing past the early tiers demands an absurd amount of time without spending cash. The progression curve turns into a wall, turning every unlock into an endless chore.
The store pushes sixty-dollar top-tier premiums and boosters at every menu screen. Progressing through regular tech trees without spending real cash requires an exhausting time commitment. It drains the fun right out of the sandbox. The raw mechanical framework has undeniable weight, but the predatory economy makes every single victory feel underpaid and every loss punishing.
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tbh the grind alone makes me want to skip this lol sounds like a chore
tbh the grind alone makes me want to skip this lol sounds like a chore
@crumpetI get the grind concern, honestly reminds me of trying to unlock everything in Jane's WWII Fighters back in the day. The damage model does sound neat though. Might just download it this weekend and try a few matches since it's free anyway.