War Thunder
Skip · Multiplayer · 2013
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The reviews do not carry it. What it costs you is time.
- Length
- 774.7h
- Price
- Free to play
- Reviews
- 71% positive
Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 70 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
War Thunder is the most comprehensive free-to-play, cross-platform, MMO military game dedicated to aviation, armoured vehicles, and naval craft, from the early 20th century to the most advanced modern combat units. Join now and take part in major battles on land, in the air, and at sea.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
Against its own genre it lands in the top 39 percent on value. Among the games that feel like it, World of Tanks (free, scores 49) beats it on value, while it beats WWII Online (free, scores 0).
81 on Metacritic, 71 percent from players. A gap this way round is usually launch damage or a slow decline.
Inside the two-hour refund window, 52 percent of the 141 reviews written there were positive, against 71 percent overall, and those are 8 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 774.7 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 4628, 6.0 times as much.
Still 50.5K concurrent players, 13 years in.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, so it runs on the handheld without fiddling.
It is still busy. 50.5K players were in it at once at the last check, across 81 days of tracking.
The drop-off
39% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
50.5K players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
The game is really captivating and forces you to grind a lot. I missed my moms bday bc of this wonderfull game.
This game is the equivalent of going outside and yelling "SOMEONE KIDNAP ME, R**E ME AND SLIT MY THROAT"...great game
The matchmaking is horrendous, you're always either playing against sweats who havent showered a day in their life or punching up by being placed in something called an "uptier". The balance of the game is also trash with tanks that you cant penetrate in a thousand years being in your tier. The servers are also poorly maintained as there are very often "ghost shells". And on top of all that, the worst thing of all...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
War Thunder scores 31/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/236390/war-thunderThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 10.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.