World of Tanks is a team-based massively multiplayer online (MMO) action game dedicated to armored warfare. The game mainly consists of tank battles between two teams on various high feature maps. In order for one team to win the battle, they must destroy all the opponent's tanks or capture the enemy flag by sitting next to it. The battle can also end up in a draw, if battle's time expires or both team captures enemy's flag almost simultaneously.
Before you start a battle you have to choose a tank with which you will fight. There are a large variety of tanks and upgrades you can choose from, organized in 4 tech trees corresponding to each nation:Soviet, USA, German and French. Each tech tree has multiple branches corresponding to different tank types:
- Light Tanks - are fast, light armored and mobile used to scout and destroy artillery opponents
- Medium Tanks - are moderate armored tanks, with moderate speed and moderate damage power; they serve many tasks on the field such as support heavier tanks, front-line tanks and scouts
- Heavy Tanks - are large tanks with slow speed, heavy armor and high damage power;they are vulnerable to fast medium tanks and artillery, if they are not supported by other tanks
- Tank Destroyers - generally don't have a turret and must rotate the whole tank to aim at a target, but have a much more powerful cannon than other tanks of the same tier and a thick front armor; though their side and back armor are much thinner
- Self-Propelled Guns - also known as artillery, are ranged armor tanks that can fire almost anywhere on the map; the down side is that they have very light armor and long reloading time
When you first create an account you'll have at your disposal 1 tank of tier 1 from each nation. As you participate in more battles and earn more experience and credits, you can advance on the next tank tier by researching and purchasing it with your earned credits. Here is an example of a tech tree:
The game can be played entirely free all the way to tier 10 tanks. There are certain limitation to free accounts, for example you can't form a platoon with more than 2 players and you can't create tank companies. But the most let down is the slow progress due to small amount of experience and credits received in battles. To bypass this limitations you can buy gold and activate premium account for a specific period ranging from 1 day to 1 year. Also you can progress even faster, by buying one of the premium tanks, granting you direct access to tanks of higher tier.
This game is one of my favorites because of it's originality and freedom of play style, and on top of that it's free.
