World of Tanks: Xbox 360 Edition Review

The year is 2014, and the only thing left populating planet Earth is tanks. The war machines have risen up against their human overlords and wiped out every last vestige of life born from mother nature. All that’s left is tanks. Big, medium and small ones, and without anything left to destroy, the slow-moving hulks of death have started turning their turrets on each other; because, you know, this is now a world of tanks.

Sounds great, right? Far better than the ‘AI gaining self-awareness’ trope that Hollywood loves to churn out. You can’t have the idea though - I’m trademarking it. No, there’s no convoluted, unwanted narrative behind Wargaming.net’s massively-multiplayer title: this is just freemium gaming at its best.

That’s right, good free-to-play games do exist, but World of Tanks makes no big deal out of the fact that it lives on your continued purchases of in-game currency. There’s no incessant advertising or thinly veiled begging here: you don’t need to spend a penny to reach the endgame or unlock extras at all. What buying premium (or gold in general) does, is increase your earning potential of silver after each battle.

Ag (that’s silver, for the uneducated) is the main currency of WoT, and it’s used for everything from buying and upgrading tanks, to obtaining consumables and different ammo types. Sinking some of your life into blowing people up will be enough to reach the best of the best too - buying gold is more of a tool to give those with less time on their hands a little boost along the way.

But most important of all, there’s no content reserved for premium players - everyone can do everything. This all means nothing, of course, if WoT’s gameplay is pants. It’s not, in fact; it’s super addictive, and that’s saying a lot for a strategy game that has two mechanics: driving a tank with the thumbsticks and blasting anything that moves with a yank of the right trigger.

If the Call of Duty series is the king of fast-paced, feature-packed warfare, then WoT is the polar opposite. This is a cleverly disguised strategy title, where direct assault means certain death. Upon selecting a tank from your garage (i.e. the menu), you’re whisked straight to war. There’s no selecting from a bloated list of game types or fiddling about with pre-match fluff - it’s straight to the front lines you pansies.

Team deathmatch, king of the hill and assault are the modes on offer, but WoT will start you off small by limiting the maps and player count available until you upgrade to a bigger set of caterpillar tracks. And once you graduate from the little league, you should have a feel for how skirmishes work. At face value, the warsim looks a little boring - a perception that’s likely to be further compounded by its simple aesthetic - and it’s not going to win any awards for atmosphere or art design, but it doesn’t need to. The well-crafted maps - which cater to all five World War II-era tanks - combined with simple controls means you’re going to start suffering from ‘one more go’ syndrome by the end of your first session.

I’ll be the first to admit that Microsoft announcing the release of WoT for Xbox 360 instilled me with as much excitement as watching bowls on TV, but we all make mistakes. World of Tanks is great fun, just try not to take the mistake of thinking that the laws of physics apply to this world.