Recent reviews by nathanjeustace

Cash grab armoury pass

£12.79 for the ability to grind for 40 points
A random gun skin is 4 points - most like going to get nothing in 10 attempts at this
You can get charms now (Yay! I guess) but they charge you to remove them from your guns. £0.79 for 3 removals
You could use 2 points to get an exclusive crate - which you then have the privilege of paying them £1.99 to open.

No fixes to bad game performance
No better team balancing
No fix to the rampant cheating problem

Just a cash grab

C'mon Valve, is the money pit not big enough yet?

I really wanted to recommend this game but I can't due to the monetization.

If you aren't very good (Like me) you will hit a wall around vehicle rank 5 (Top is about 11), due to the increasing costs of everything. At this point you will begin losing money (Silver Lions, SLs) almost every game and it will feel like you are being punished for playing. This occurs even with premium, costing £70 a year, which doubles your income. People who are better at the game will manage to get to a higher rank than this but when you read other reviews you find that they hit the same problem 1 or 2 ranks later and get to the point where an average game (1-1.5 K/D) loses them SLs too.

Things that cost SLs and my opinion on them:
- Vehicles. The Cost increases as you go up ranks. This makes sense to me, although prices get VERY... steep especially when you are constantly losing money or only making a couple of thousand SLs a game. A 4.0 rank (Low mid) Achilles tank costs 100,000 SLs
- Assigning a crew to a vehicle. Once you buy the vehicle you then also have to pay to put a crew in it. Complete madness, I just paid for the vehicle, why do I now have to pay more to use it? This also causes issues when you want to switch vehicles to play with a friend who only has vehicles with lower ranks, so they don't end up facing vehicles 2 ranks higher than them. For the above Achilles tank this costs 29,000 SLs
- Repairs on vehicle. The cost increases as you go up ranks - This is the main problem with the game in my opinion and the reason SLs are lost or only a tiny amount are gained in almost every game. Repair costs also causes issues with vehicle variety. Different vehicles cost different amounts to repair, even at the same rank, and because of this there is an abundance of vehicles with cheap repair costs being used whereas the other get neglected because people often lose money when they use them. For the above Achilles the max repair cost is 1,400 SLs. How much does a kill earn with the Achilles? About 1,100 SLs.
- Ammunition. Not all, but special types do. I guess this is to balance the use of certain ammo types but I've read that the cost of the ammo usually isn't worth the SLs received for a kill whilst using them.
- Vehicle upgrades. Makes sense to me.

I can understand a wall being reached at high mid-tier for people who don't have premium to incentivize its purchase, it is a F2P game after all and has to make money somewhere. But no one paying 1.5 times the price of a new AAA game every year for a premium account should feel like they are being punished for playing the game and feel forced to spend more money to progress past the mid-tier.

The main problem with the game is repair costs. The reason given for repair costs is balancing, better vehicles cost more to repair to encourage people to play more low tier games and to use less powerful vehicles in same tier games. Which would make sense but I believe there is a better way of doing this that already exists in the game. Each vehicle already has a SL reward modifier. My suggestion would be to remove repair costs entirely and tweak the SL reward modifiers. Stronger vehicles in a tier now earn less than their weaker counterparts (as they usually do anyway) but now people can use them without being afraid of losing money and feeling punished. Fewer people still use these vehicles because they earn less, keeping the balance. You can then tweak the cost of buying vehicles (Get rid of crew change costs, there's no need for them) so that the exponential increase in price for higher tier vehicles is higher. This counteracts the now higher and always positive SL reward so that people keep buying premium time. I believe that with the right combination of these two you can make the game much more enjoyable, less punishing and keep people buying premium.

Fun customisation of ships however there's a distinct lack of planetary management.