Staff – May 1, 2019 at 11:01 AM
The battles in War Thunder can get hairy in a hurry. You’re flying over urban Alaska, tank cannons booming in the distance, trying to shoot down a bomber before it reaches your ground support. You’re chasing a destroyer through the South Pacific with two gunboats on your own tail and a swarm of jets stinging each other above. You are, at all times, hunter and hunted.
War Thunder presents a world of intimidating depth and realism, featuring more than 1,200 exquisitely recreated real-life military vehicles, all of which have their own peculiar strengths and weaknesses for the player to navigate. In time, you come to appreciate the way a particular helicopter handles, or you become attached to a certain cruiser’s main gun. The finer points of darting and dodging through a dogfight become second nature.
But the game starts out approachably enough. You choose whether you want to fight from the skies, the seas, or on the ground, and a brief tutorial guides you through the basics of doing so before you’re released into online combat against a swarm of other War Thunder novices. From there, you learn through doing: racking up kills and getting blindsided by opponents, unlocking new vehicles and upgrading old standbys along the way. Maybe you discover that you’ve got more of a taste for naval combat than ground warfare. You can abandon your tank for a destroyer. The game’s many layers reveal themselves to you gradually.
This rewarding sense of progression is the reason many military gaming enthusiasts have been enthralled by War Thunder since it was first released in 2013. The team at Gaijin Entertainment have provided continuous support for their free-to-play battler, steadily broadening the game’s roster of vehicles and introducing fresh gameplay elements in the form of robust, regular updates. Their latest one is called Locked On, and, according to Lead Developer Viacheslav Bulannikov, “It has added more than 30 new playable aircraft, tanks, helicopters, and ships to War Thunder.” It also features a suite of new maps and mechanics.
The splashiest new features in this update are the addition of radar and guided missiles. A number of tanks and anti-aircraft vehicles, as well as jets and a handful of planes, have been outfitted with radar systems. This is a significant development particularly for anti-aircraft guns, which have greater range than ever before. “Technology has changed the capability of combat vehicles dramatically,” Bulannikov explains. “In gameplay terms, this translates into an entirely new experience for our players.” For instance, the Italian Otomatic can now track aircraft up to 6,000 meters away, rendering it a highly useful tool in defending your team’s ground forces against aerial assaults. Overall, the addition of radar provides War Thunder with a more balanced fight between air and land units.
Guided missiles are fun to play around with, too, in part because they’re fiddly and a little bit cumbersome. It takes a while to lock on to your target before you fire them, and since the missiles have primitive heat-seeking tech, they’re liable to scream well wide of a skilled pilot. In other words, they’re not a game-breaking mechanic. It takes knowhow and a bit of luck to work with them, but the satisfying fwomp! they produce as they smash into an oblivious enemy makes them worth the hassle.
The new technologies the Locked On update introduces further advance War Thunder’s steady crawl toward the present. “Our game already features the most comprehensive arsenal of playable World War II vehicles,” Bulannikov says. “And now we have expanded the game’s technological scope almost to the modern day.” The effect of this, if you’re new to War Thunder, is the opportunity to travel through time as you log more hours in the game. You can start out in a modest biplane from the 1930s and end up patrolling the skies in a supersonic jet as your piloting skills continue to develop.
Bulannikov believes the accessibility of this rich experience is the key to War Thunder’s popularity. “All you need to enjoy the game to the fullest is a mouse and a keyboard or gamepad,” he says. It’s a pick-up-and-play commitment into which you can invest some serious time.
War Thunder is available for free download on PC. There’s currently a promotional starter pack available for new players, which nets you two premium vehicles and a three-day premium trial account. Locked On is only the latest War Thunder update. There will be more content and gameplay innovations to come through the spring and summer months, as Gaijin continues to flesh out their expansive vehicle combat simulator.
