Recent reviews by Rex Gangrene

I don't know what triggered this wave of negative reviews- specifically- but it is overdue. It also reminded me that I should've probably done this a while ago.
War Thunder is an excellent sim-lite game trapped inside a cage of financial trickery, one which trickles down and infects every aspect of the experience. It has some of the smoothest aircraft and tank controls, with mouse aim flight in particular done in a way that no other game has managed to ape so far. The models (notably outsourced) are detail rich and look decent to quite good, especially back when it launched. It's got no shortage of vehicles (distributed unequally) and systems. Said vehicles can be deployed in combined arms gameplay that, while it stands to improve in variety and balance, is occasionally entertaining. But this is all constantly undercut by money grubbing design decisions easily summarized by what seems to be WT's guiding philosophy: this game is designed to frustrate the player first and entertain them second (and by god never to accurately simulate anything, no matter how many court martials go into funneling classified documents to it).
I have been playing this game casually since the top end of technology was the Korean War, and I still have yet to get a single jet aircraft or postwar tank. The grind has always been atrocious, in a transparent attempt to milk money from the playerbase with an exorbitant subscription model that feels like it's removing artificial penalties rather than boosting research. The aforementioned vehicles are added in a way that is very easily deciphered as cynical fodder for the grind; the original WWII and Korean War vehicles are rarely paraded in advertisements- but rooks, apaches, and phantoms? You'd be forgiven for forgetting the folgore is what you start with. A new player interested in using any of these aircraft will either trudge down a long road or spend the equivalent of a full AAA game only to find out that guided missiles and radar systems are integrated with less fidelity than in Il-2 1946. Cluttered menus betray even more of this schizophrenic development history, advertising gamemodes not touched in years and even the last fossilized remnants of Il-2: Birds of Steel in the form of some buggy campaign missions.
Gaijin often appears to tacitly admit these problems or even seemingly relish in them, and even community partners (or whatever they're called) often feel stonewalled by their response to criticisms. War Thunder's issues run as deep as the game itself, and in the interest of brevity (and since I'm pretty sure nobody's going to read this) I'll let the other reviews dissect it further. I sincerely hope that one day the thoroughbred horse that is the dagor engine (said in semi-jest) is unhitched from WT's toxic trash-wagon, but that's something that would've been done best a few years ago when it was merely old instead of positively miserly.

So in short: if you're okay with a deeply mismanaged product whose stated goal is to waste years of your time, where development is squandered on arbitrary changes or adding hard-drive sagging volumes of content to an already overstuffed game, war thunder is for you. If this is the case please shoot me a DM as well, I'd also like to sell you some things.