First Impressions: War Thunder

War Thunder is another PS4 game that we played at EGX. This one is a shooter where you play as a pilot of a fighter plane set in the WW2 era which leads to some interesting control choices. I've since downloaded this game on Steam (it's free) and together Satamer and I have spent four hours on it.



The graphics are stunning and the music is just as good. The only problem I have with it is the controls. Not that they're bad (they really make you get a feeling of how hard it is to fly a plane and let you do some really cool tricks and manoeuvres) just hard to get used to. The reason for this is that they are inverted (like most plane games) and I just felt that some of the controls were in the wrong places.

Anyway, back to what you do in the game. There are two classes of planes that I used in my run-through, fighter and bomber. Fighter is the standard class and are used to take down other fighters and bombers as well as occasionally using them to gun down artillery and tanks in death defying dives towards the ground. Bombers bomb things such as tanks, artillery and towns (I haven't seen anyone bomb a plane yet but if anyone has or know if it's possible then please comment). All of the planes are based on real planes from the WW2 era, so if you ever wanted to fly a spitfire, now you can! Planes count as lives and when you run out of planes in your reserve then you swap to spectator mode.

One thing which I found cool was that if you were good enough (or lucky enough) you could run along the ground before taking off again. I can imagine that this leads to some really exciting dogfights where you run up mountains before spinning round and shooting your opponent in the back. The only thing stopping you from doing amazing tricks (besides your skills and other players) is the g-force and speed mechanics. The g-force mechanic means that if you turn to quickly or go to fast, your screen goes grey and you can black out while the speed mechanic means that if you try to go up too high, too slowly, your plane will begin to fall.

Overall, War Thunder is a really good game that experiments with the shooter genre while still making it really fun to play. I really look forward to trying out death defying dives and tricks while being chased by all of the enemy planes and tanks before destroying them all in one fell swoop... wow, I really need some practice. Review out soon.

Goodbye for now, Harry