Recent reviews by Mommy Wine Time

scawy :(

This game was made by people who have never played a video game and never been in a kitchen in their entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ life. Controls are incredibly clunky, items are arbitrarily removed from your inventory forcing you to fail services because you can't season things, the kitchen is the size of a football field meaning when those things are removed from your inventory everything will burn as you search through your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ warehouse to find them. I wish I played this game for 30 minutes less so I could get my money back.
--------------------------------------------------------
EDIT
I'm keeping my original review for transparency and as I stand by it however I realise that it wasn't very constructive. Now that I know the developer actually reads these I'll try to be more constructive with my criticism.

I've spent most of my life working in kitchens, work as both a sous chef and chef before in French brigade style kitchens and I can tell you the game does a fairly poor job of showing you at all what it's like. This is not criticism on the artistic direction, but its the functionality that's absent. In a proper kitchen, every inch of space is utilised and nothing is left empty. There are no shelves that don't have a fridge underneath them on a line, and in a prep kitchen the space is still used. That might seem like a nit-pick, but having that space filled with the things you need for service is ESSENTIAL. Having a fridge that only holds 9 items (and is modelled after what appears to be a biology lab fridge) is insane.

Additionally, your typical line kitchen (even in very fancy places) is typically 1/3 the size of the kitchen in this game. That might seem like a bad thing but trust me it's not. You want everything close, you don't want to run around to find what you're looking for.

If the dev re-reads this, my suggestions are make all worktops (excluding ovens, fryers, etc..) have the option of including a 6 item fridge or dry storage, for a price of course. That, and for the players starting restaurant have a kitchen 1/4 the size. This is supposed to be a place they get right out of culinary school, not a 15 million dollar place (Hell, if you wanted the game to be realistic, make half the appliances not work)

My third suggestion was not mentioned above but is also something literally every restaurant does. Produce is ordered typically twice a week, not every day. Let the player keep prepped items in the line fridges. Having prepped food in there for a night or two is no big deal but make it so that all the prepped items go bad at different rates. Let the player for a strategy for say a Friday night service by prepping more on Thursday. Deleting all the items in the fridge after every service is insane.

This review is going to be pretty long and probably seem unhinged at times, but if you want the TL;DR, do not spend any money at all on this game unless you're not only cool with playing a game that is fundamentally broken but also want to reward a company who knows their game is broken and aims to profit off of the frustration this causes.

I have been playing WT on and off since 2016 and I want to start by saying I love this game, or at least I love the idea of it. Having an intensely detailed combined arms vehicle game that spans from (roughly) the 20's to (roughly) now is a dream come true. That being said, there is too much wrong with it in it's current state for me to encourage people even downloading the game, let alone spending any money on it.

I'm also going to preface this by saying that I am a hypocrite. I have spent money on this game before and I will likely do so in the future because I am stupid and want funny jet. Moving on.

1. Balance

This game is horribly unbalanced. The game has three "Major" tech trees and 7 "Minor" ones. Now it would be expected that each tree has it's own unique doctrine behind their vehicles design and implementation, which is true in the amazing world of IRL but not in war thunder. Many vehicles with different designs are pressed into the "hold W until you see someone" role or "flank until you see someone" role. This itself is not really an issue, as all these different vehicles can definitely be played to their individual strengths and the doctrines of different countries can even be used as hard counters to other countries. There are two problems that arise from here though. First, is that some nations have access to tactics that can absolutely break the balance of the game. This mainly comes down to CAS, or having the piss bombed out of you until your team quits. America and Germany get very solid bomb and cannon CAS respectively and are simply not fun to fight against, especially when they're on a team together. The second point involved the third major nation, the USSR, where the game doesn't attempt to balance the release of new vehicles (because they cost real life dollars off of mommy's credit card and Gaijin will stop at nothing to milk it). This isn't exclusive to the USSR, not by a long shot, but we see it somewhat more frequently with them so I'll use them as an example. New premium will get released and it will be absolutely busted. Pay $60 for the ability to steamroll an enemy team (if you know how to play the game even a little bit) because the armor doesn't spall correctly, the ammo is overpowered and it has, i don't know, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ aircraft tracking as a light tank (bonus points if you can name the vehicle im talking about lol). Then a month or two later it will get nerfed to being nearly useless. Rinse and repeat.

2. Maps

I have no idea who the map lead on this game is, but I wouldn't be surprised if I found out they had never played another online combat game in their life. In nearly 50% of games I've played the match ends with one team locking the other in their spawn. Usually the team doing the spawn camping doesn't even have all the points capped, but the design of the maps encourages spawn camping and there is nothing in the game that punishes it, even a little bit. In air matches if you get too close to an enemy airfield you get shot down. Does this cause problems of it's own? Yeah. But it's more fair that anything, and if someone wants to sit in their airfield to avoid getting shot down and paying that crazy repair cost on their brand new JU 288 you can just fly around slamming ground targets until the match ends. Ground battles? Whole different story. Prepare to get trapped in your spawn on roughly every second match, be it by german talks hitting you with APHE from their own spawn 4km away, CAS blasting you to ♥♥♥♥, or some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in a heavy tank that's spent the past 6 minutes circumnavigating the globe to club you like a seal the second your brief spawn protection wares off.

3. The grind

Assuming you're okay at the game, assuming (generously) that you have a premium account, and assuming (extremely generously) that you win most of the games you play (the number we're using here is about 2,000RP a game), if will take you ~2 matches for each tier one vehicle. Not so bad right? it's about ~3-5 for tier 2 vehicles. Still not crazy. for tier 3 its about 15 games, tier 4 is about 40, 5 is 70, it only gets worse. Remember, this is PER VEHICLE. Want to play as that sick M1 Abrams you saw in all the promotional material? Get ready to sink in at least 4-5 months of grinding, because you will need to make 2000RP in 1315 games (yes I did the math its a total of 2,631,400RP for all vehicles before it plus the two leading up to the M1 also yes I know you can make a beeline for just the abrams doing minimal research but that also means you won't have lineups until you get it which will arguably make the grind even longer).

Have fun :)

4. The company.

Gaijin is definitely a company with people that are very passionate about the game and about the subject matter, but that doesn't come across when all of these issues have been addressed with nothing short of "give us money". Hate the grind? Pay to skip it. Hate that map that literally always ends in spawn camping? Pay to ban it from rotation. Hate the horribly broken vehicle you always seem to get one shot by? Pay for that exact vehicle and inflict misery on other people (spoiler you will still get one shot by someone because buying a high tier premium doesn't make you good at the game suddenly). Gaijin knows about every issue I've mentioned and the dozens I haven't and has not, and will not do a single thing to correct them because it makes them money. The only way to really stop it is if people avoid giving them money at all to force their hand, but lets be honest that's not going to happen.

So yeah, I can't in good faith recommend this game to anyone. If you enjoy eating glass and giving yourself concussions then go to town and start playing but if you like yourself please avoid it.

I'm not going to proofread this review, if I spelt anything weird or said anything dumb ♥♥♥♥ you that's your problem


EDIT:

I was wrong in the last paragraph when I said that "but lets be honest that's not going to happen."

Do not play the game. Do not give them money. Make them sweat and force them to consider every money hungry anti-consumer decision they've ever made. Without them we don't have War Thunder. Without us they don't have a job.