What is World of Warships ?

Ahoy Mateys, 

Admiral Balans here. As this is my 1st blog here, I have done a fair bit of browsing through blogs here, particularity on the video games section and find that the said category needs more content or game review or introduction. 

So, what is World of Warships ?  It's a free to play, strategic MMO game produced and published by Wargaming (WG), a European-based/Russian, (considered to be somewhat underrated) game developer. Released in 2015, believe it or not, it's still in beta after 5 years since the release(current version: 0.9.4). Players can choose to get the game on Steam or from their Official website. Take note that their game servers are divided into four regions; NA,EU,CIS and SEA. 

World of Warships, the thinking man's action game.

As the advertisement suggests, the game require its players to have a fair bit of tactical naval warfare knowledge on the ship types, ship roles and responsibilities as well as map awareness in order to excel. TEAMWORK is the utmost importance of this game, as well as any other online games. 

Unlike most shooters and MOBA games like CSGO and Dota, here in WoWs, you will be placed in a team of 7 or more in a single game mode. There are three different battle modes: Standard, Domination and Epicenter, where your team wins either by scoring the highest (out of 1000 pts) by playing the objectives or by destroying all enemy ships before the timer runs out. Players can choose to engage in PVP (Random Battles, Ranked and Clan battle) or Co-op mode (you and other players vs. bots). However, players also can choose to be in Scenario Battles(you, other players and bots vs. bots), where you win by completing all game objectives like escorting friendly convoy ships and repelling enemy attacks on the convoy and many more. 

The warships in the game cover periods from as early as the 20th century, at the dawn of dreadnought-heavy-mammoth-like battleships, up to the warships of the 1950's or the 1960's including those that were planned but never really made it into the production as what the WoWs community put it as, "The Paper Ships". Players can choose to master four different types of warships of varying roles: destroyers, cruisers, battleships and aircraft carriers. 

Ship Roles

Destroyers aka (DD): smallest, fastest and most maneuverable ship in the game. Equipped with the lightest amour among all classes, they have the powerful torpedoes in the game. You do not want to get hit by one of these things, I tell ya. They are the front-liners, providing vision for the friendlies and leading the objectives. DD's have the lowest health pool among all classes in the game. Oh ! and most of them are equipped with a "smoke consumable",where upon activation, a thick layer of smoke will cloud them over a duration of time so they can tactically retreat under crossfires OR to ambush the enemy with their powerful torpedoes. More here: https://worldofwarships.asia/en/content/guides/vehicles-destroyers/

 Cruisers aka (CA/CL): jack of all trades in the game. Their configuration makes them one of the most versatile warship in the battle. They have meh amour among all but these guys love hunting DD's especially when they're hiding in the smoke screen. Some of them have great AA, making CVs think twice before dropping on them. Some CLs can even be BB's worst nightmare by pumping out their firery shells every 3 seconds, making it rain, setting enemy on multiply fires. Imagine this, you have 4 guns, 4 turrets.. that's 16 guns pumping 12 shells every 2 seconds or so. yes Smolenks, I'm looking at you.... More here: https://worldofwarships.asia/en/content/guides/vehicles-cruisers/

 Battleships aka (BB): the heavy boxer, brawler, can tank anything, damage-taking ship-class in the game. Equipped with the thickest amour, these giants are effective in dealing with annoying CA/CLs roaming around. Being thicc has a disadvantage, you are slow. That's what most BBs are in the game, especially the American ones (T3-T7) and Japanese ones. Ever heard of Yamato or Bismarck ? 

yeah, these thicc bois or gals. :https://worldofwarships.asia/en/content/guides/vehicles-battleships/

Aircraft Carries aka (CV): the floating airport, floating colony, the mothership or whatever name you want to call her. She is the most annoying class to play against. That is of course, if she's captained by a veteran player. They are the bastards to hunt DDs who are leading the objectives, CL/CAs who are out and about and BBs despite how great their AAs are. There's always a walk-around to great AA, according to WG. Not much I can say about this class, you basically send planes up, spot, engage and destroy. repeat. https://worldofwarships.asia/en/content/guides/vehicles-carriers/

 The game features naval power from various countries including the United States Navy (USN), the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN), the Royal Navy (RN), German Kriegsmarine (KM), the Italian Regia Marina, French Navy, Pan-European Navy (Polish & Swedish), Red Yeet (Russian balans Navy), Pan-Asian (SEA,CN,TW) Navy and many more. Players can progress through the game by researching ships from each tier from tier 1 to tier 10 from the tech tree. Yes, it is a grindy game. Well, it's the best time to play WoWs during the lockdown. 

Pros

• Quite historically accurate warships 

• Great graphics (Great ship and map modelling by the WG team) 

• Game is always updated with new contents and events (Current event: New Russian Heavy Cruiser/Russian Tech Tree Split) 

• Very tactical, strategic game that promotes Teamwork 

• It's FREE 

Cons

• Prior to my previous point, It's Free, but it's PAID TO WIN. You don't get much benefits as paid players do in game. 

• Lousy match-making at times. Sometimes, lower tier players (T6) can be up-tier-ed to (T9 or T10) in a single battle altho quite raw for such a huge tier gap, but it happened before. 

• "CV's are fine and not over powered" claimed by the WG team when they're quite broken. 

• Russian Bias. Because they're headquartered in St. Petersburg and they're Russians. They have to make Russian Ships slightly more OP than the rest. At some instances, when testers claimed that the ship is too OP, they'll just buff it ever so slightly just to nerf it again. Redundant much ??

• Paper ships gets put into the game. AKA ships that were planned and designed but never made it to production. Due to this, balancing them is quite challenging. At the current update (0.9.4), many new paper Russian Ships are coming to the game. Some are quite balanced but many are not. But WG said that they're Balans. Hence, my name....

• Submarines are coming !. When CVs are not perfectly balanced, they're putting subs into the game this coming small update (0.9.4.1) in a separate battle mode. Good job WG !

• Some players can be salty/toxic. Then again, it's an online game....so it's self-explanatory 

Summary

Despite the Cons that outweighs the Pros, WoWs is fairly a great game. I have enjoyed my time here in WoWs. I'd give a 7/10 start rating to this game and would recommend you to try it. You can download it here: https://wows.asia/Capt_Skywalker (for Asia only) or look it up on Steam or their official site.  Also, shout out to Brave for their awesome browser: https://brave.com/edi898

If you've made it this far reading this, I hope you've enjoy my rant/review on this game. Hope to see yáll in the 7th seas soon !