Free to play: World of Tanks

“The players in World of Tanks can choose four primary types of battles: random battles, team-training battles, tank-company battles, and clan battles.

In random battles players are automatically assigned to one of two teams. Up to three friends can platoon together ensuring they get placed on the same team. In clan battles gamers fight for a particular clan on a simplified map of Europe. Tank-company battles are like clan battles, but anyone (up to 15 people) can join your tank company. When you have your tank company filled up, matchmaking will put you against another, random tank company on a random map.

Each team can have no more than 15 players in it – giving a total of 30 per battle. The goal of each team is to eliminate the enemy or capture thair base. Rewards are mostly proportional to damage inflicted.

The basic mode of the game is team death match / capture the flag, where teamwork takes precedence over “lone wolf” style play. Combat begins with players squaring off at predetermined locations, usually directly across from each other on the maps. Typically between 400 meters and 1 km distance exists between the two teams”

Everyone’s first impression: “World of Tanks?” this game is certainly a unique one, you can think of it as Battlefield but without the infantry and annoying air support floating about destroying everything in their path, this game is focused on the tanks only in a battlefield. You don’t find a lot of games that include entertainment while educating you at the same time, in WoT there is a large variation of tanks which all include the background of the tank, interesting indeed.

A battlefield full of tanks may sound dull, but being able to customize your tanks with different types of engines, suspensions, radios and even main firing methods now this is where it gets interesting, you earn experience and in-game credit which you can use to unlock new tanks and the above mentioned customizations and “Pimp out” your tank to go wreak havoc on your opposing team. You can think of WoT as a first person shooter but instead of being a squishy human running around shooting people, you can be a huge metal tank shooting exploding tank shells at enemies, now that sounds fun!

Everyone knows free to play games usually have bad graphics, unresponsive menus and even buggy gameplay but WoT has none surprisingly, the graphics is quite amazing and even puts high-end gaming computers under some pressure, the menu is very well designed, well technically I wouldn’t call it a menu at all, you are basically in a garage where you can select your tank and its customizations before entering the battlefield to go defend your honor, original and well thought out.

But like all free to play games there is indeed a catch, no you don’t have to pay to unlock anything else in the game but there is an option where you can trade real life currency for in-game gold coins which let you unlock overpowered tanks and customizations, but alas the amount of people who would actually spend money on in-game perks are at a minimal and you’re basically faced versus equal opponents that have played long and worked hard on earning their tanks and whatever is in the rest of their little package of destruction.

World of Tanks is an online game which requires an internet connection, sadly there is no single player, but that’s alright who would miss the chance to blow up someones tank and know they’re feeling humiliated in real life? I would definitely recommend this game to anyone that has been a fan of the Battlefield series or even someone who just likes gaming but who is also interested in anything to do with mechanical monsters which roamed during the times of the world war’s and still do (Tanks).

I would also advise South-African players to rather stick to the Europe version of the game because your latency is gonna be a lot better than on the US servers, links will be below including some in-game screenshot’s for eyecandy.

Europe : http://www.worldoftanks.eu/

USA : http://worldoftanks.com/