War Thunder

It started out as a flight game, with about 200 aircraft in the 2012 open beta. Tanks arrived in May 2014 and helicopters by the end of 2018, and the game only officially left beta in December 2016.

Players argued about how accurately the vehicles were modeled, and they argued hard. In July 2021 a forum user who claimed to command a Challenger 2 posted pages of a classified manual for the tank to prove the game got it wrong. Gaijin replied that it works only with public and declassified material, and moderators removed the post. Leaks like that happened more than a dozen times after that, from the Leclerc to the F-16.

At launch reviews were mostly positive, though one reviewer found the menus outside battle cluttered. In May 2023 Gaijin set out to change the in-game economy, players flooded Steam with negative reviews, and the studio backed away from the changes and apologized. Players give it 71% positive across 797,495 reviews, and critics 81 on Metacritic. Our Recommended Score puts it at 2,213 of 4,736.

Liked it? Try DCS World Steam Edition, where aircraft are modeled on real-world data and the cockpit buttons and switches work, and World of Tanks, where every player drives a single vehicle in team battles.