World of Warships Review - Fun, Fast-Paced, And Free

[P-89 Scorpion]

"When you first log in to World of Warships, you'll have access to a starting fleet of Battleships, Cruisers, Destroyers, and even Aircraft carriers."

No, when you first log on you'll have access to cruisers. The other ships have to be unlocked. New classes are made available at successive tiers, to slowly ease new players into the game without swamping them with game mechanics. The very earliest you can get a carrier is as your sixth ship.

"recall planes for repair and refueling."

You mean repairing, rearming, and replenishing depleted squadrons. Aircraft in WoWS don't run out of gas.

Other than that, good review.

A word of warning to new players though, balance is still somewhat iffy across the tiers. Low-tier battleships in particular are basically defenseless against carriers, with neither the anti-aircraft guns to shoot planes down, nor the agility to dodge torpedoes, nor an effective cruiser screen to intercept bombers. Tier 4 battleships are definitely a trial by fire, though they start to come into their own by tier 5.

Planes don't repair only rearm and replenish flight strength.

If your planes get hit by AA or intercepted by enemy fighters but don't die and return to rearm they will die quicker if attacked again as there health pool is not replenished.

 

[Kotoriii]

It really needs to implement the German and British ship lines ASAP. It gets very binary to just be able to play US or Japanese ships. Other than that, the game is very enjoyable

 

[Aetrion]

The biggest problem with World of Warships is how insanely random the gunnery aspect of it is. Your guns spread like crazy, so even when volley firing it's more luck than skill to actually hit a target. On top of that the damage model works in such a way that shell can do next to no damage, only shaving a couple hundred HP off the enemy, while another shell penetrates the magazine and instantly kills the enemy ship from full health.

Sure, that's realistic, but it's insanely frustrating in public matches where your own ship is really the only thing you have any influence over in a game where individual actions are so heavily randomized that the positioning of your team is the main deciding factor to winning or losing.

If World of Warships was an RTS game all of its systems would make perfect sense, but it isn't. Any attempt to get a random team to adopt a strategy will result in maybe 20% of people following it, 60% completely ignoring it, and another 20% being where you need them to be by pure chance, and that's if you ask nicely. Don't even try to tell anyone they are doing it wrong.


Overall this isn't a bad game, I've had fun with it, but you very quickly realize that the only ships in the game that reward individual skill are the destroyers, which is why half of the people play them. Destroyers can dodge cannon volleys, and with torpedoes there is no RNG screwing you over, whether a torpedo hits or not always comes down to where you shot them and how your target is trying to evade them. If the cannons in the game were equally fair to the players this would be a MUCH better game.