WORLD OF WARPLANES

Just like in World of Tanks and World of Warships, this game concentrates on the inter-war era of the 20th century and later years, offering a look into what air battles looked like. While World of Warplanes gained some interest shortly after premiere in 2013, soon it became the lame duck in the portfolio of Wargaming.net, mostly due to the disastrous concept of the game, or rather lack of it.

While in WoT and WoWS it is easy to use the zone capture as the factor to determine which side is reaching their targets, exactly the same solution transferred to WoWP was simply a mistake. Yes, we have here the zone capture element of the game, where pilots can destroy the land infrastructure to gain control of the area, but at the same time it makes very little sense - destruction of enemy building can hardly be considered gaining air superiority in the area. The introduction of air defence airplanes makes it all even more confusing, they are bots that scramble to defend the points, but are not really trying to be honest. You can shoot down a lot of enemy planes, some of them are just bots, some of them are defence airplanes, but it does not mean that your team is ahead on points because the most important is the "control" of the strategic areas. So you can have an advantage in numbers, but still, the enemy will have air superiority in the area...

Basically, the game is at the beginning, slightly confusing, you are instructed how to gain some coins and spend some coins of your own, but some basics (like which button drops the bomb) are left pretty much to your imagination. A similar story is with the basics of the zone capture system - you learn it during the battles or from less than helpful tips displayed while the game is loading. The concepts copied from WoT simply do not work well in WoWP, and it shows during the battle.

The tech-tree system, also copied from World of Tanks, gives very limited options to begin with - you can choose between fighter planes, multirole fighter planes and... that’s about it. There are planes that originally were bombers (like the British Blackburn Skua), but in WoWP they are taken the role of fighter planes (when it comes to speed and handling) that are also capable of dropping bombs, which is far from being realistic. Yes, of course Skua had some capability in aerial combat, but making very tight turns that allows to keep up with fighters, while still carrying gunner and bomb... I don’t think so. The bomber lines in tech tree were introduced with time, but only in some nations.

World of Warplanes, even over 6 years from premiere, still seems to be looking for purpose, which is not a good sign. The dogfighting is done in a really simplified way (you have to shoot the enemy until he loses all HP points, not until you shot off his wing or blow up the engine), the air-to-land operations are really simplified, the lack of variety in planes makes the game actually really boring. While World of Tanks and World of Warships managed to find a niche in the market, World of Warplanes still struggles to justify its existence. It is hard to even determine how many players are playing WoWP because the game (unlike WoT and WoWS) does not show number of players in the queue, which suggests that the numbers are really low indeed.

Comparing to its direct competition, War Thunder, World of Warplanes is miles behind when it comes to realism and basic concept of the game. It is missing a lot of elements that would make it an interesting offer, not to mention you would be ready to pay for taking part in the game.

Rating: 1.5 / 5 based on 4 votes

★★☆☆☆