Really not worth its price currently. When and if they implement at least WW2 era tanks, the price will make sense, but right now, there's barely an hour or two of content before you're in a mindlessly repetetive loop with no interesting events happening.

The British empire rejects all the time you lose money the fast and you go bankrupt and you have to reset your hole game please fix it

The concepts shown here are a lot of fun if you like tanks, logistics, and engineering. They're in a pretty basic but solid enough state to give you a good grasp of what to expect from the game and should only get better and better with more development. It's playable but not perfectly polished and definitely should be viewed like a demo at the moment.

I really appreciate that it hits an almost universally overlooked piece of warfare in strategy games -- the military-industrial complex, and how it impacts the nature of conflict. The desire to sell your cheapest-to-build tank for a bigger profit margin on the contract instead of a better operator is real. The logistics around importing supplies, building the product, and shipping it out seems simple and easy enough to grasp at the moment with what feels like obviously extensible areas for greater depth and complexity in the future.

The wars at the moment seem more randomly generated than historically influenced but showcase how conflicts drive contracts drive development. I'm kind of hoping there is a historical mode that tries to closely follow the diplomacy and wars of the 20th century, especially considering the feedback loop for your tanks and contracts where you get battlefield reports from tank unit commanders on how your products did in the field. This is one of the most fun and interesting parts of the game, and seeing your previous model turning the tide of a battle for a country's military while you're actively prototyping the nextgen (that will blow even that old one away just you wait!) is a special kind of feeling.

The financial balance of things is a bit difficult currently, but I would be surprised if that doesn't improve greatly over the course of EA, and it's most noticeable due to the limited number of contracts available early on (mostly because no one's using tanks seriously for the first few years). It seemed a lot easier to get contracts if you were always engineering new designs and also pay for competitor insights to know what number you need to hit for your bids. There seems to be a learning curve with the financials that is mostly impacted by a very limited tutorial, leaving the player to try to cobble the presented ideas together and figure things out on their own.

The variations available in research does feel limited or linear (but I imagine will expand a lot over time) but are really made much more interesting by the trophy-reverse-engineering system, which ended up being a lot of fun. There's nothing quite like stealing another country's company's tank design and blending it with your own to make a what-if frankenstein monster for the battlefield.

It's a great foundation and I want more of everything I'm seeing!