World of Warplanes First Look

We checked out World of Warplanes from Wargaming recently to have a First Look at the game, having never actually gotten round to playing it before. Our First Look comes at a time where the game has entered its new 2.0 release that has all sorts of updates for old and new players alike.

Whilst we’ve never played WoWP before, we are more familiar with its sister titles World of Tanks and the newer World of Warships, with this in mind we didn’t come to the game as a complete newbie. The progression system for WoWP is essentially the same as the other titles; players earn XP through games to unlock new vehicles, and earn and spend credits to buy those vehicles and upgrade them in various ways to suit their playstyle. None of this was an issue for us as we’d been provided a press account to check out 2.0 and so had access to every plane in the game, all fully upgraded!

Being inexperienced with the game and not sure of the controls, we tried to jump into a training match, surprisingly the available teams were full and we sat waiting patiently but to no avail. Thinking “why the hell not” we jumped in the deep end and just played a normal PVP game against other players, opting to use the new Bomber plane. In our first ever game we set off from our base and starting scrambling around trying to work out the controls and it was whilst we were in the settings menu mid-flight that we first tasted the sweet embrace of death as we were blown to pieces by an enemy fighter. A blessing in disguise as it did allow us to then check out the controls waiting for the respawn.

It was actually quite surprising how few controls there were and it really did emphasize what they say about World of Warplanes being an arcade plane shooter in comparison to other MMOs. For us this was perfect and after a warm up game we felt well prepared. Jumping into our next match we quickly took to the clouds, learning that we could operate a pretty high altitude without much concern. Using our bombing camera angle our objective was to line up our sights on the enemy or neutral ground targets and try and destroy them to gain superiority of an objective that would then capture it to increase the tick on our team score.

As a bomber that was pretty much our experience, floating around in the sky and staying out of most of the action. Anti-aircraft NPC turrets were our biggest problem, especially when we headed off solo to try and take an enemy point, being the only aircraft there we got peppered pretty quickly. We only got into one “dogfight” when an enemy plane flew in front of us, much to our delight, until we started getting shot to pieces. We presumed we’d missed an enemy on our tail, with the bullet trails skimming all around us, we then realised it was the bomber we were following that was using their rear guns! Damn new additions!

Overall it was a fun experience and the controls are very easy to get into the game quickly; a little more experience and we think we’d be ready for some fighter based dog fights!