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Take To The Skies In World Of Warplanes
Despite a title that sounds a bit like the game your grandmother buys for you in lieu of the game you actually want by accident, Warplanes seems to be a fully featured multiplayer title that will please fans of airplane dogfighting.
World of Warplanes comes from the makers of World of Tanks, the free-to-play MMO shooter on Wargaming.net. Since World of Tanks left beta, Wargaming.net has expanded dramatically by more than doubling its number of employees, online users, and offices.
Warplanes will adhere to the same ideas that are present in Tanks. These games are MMOs offering players experience to level their planes and tanks, but it’s not a game that needs to be played for hundreds of hours to derive any pleasure. Just as in Tanks, Planes versus matches will last 15 minutes each, only coming to a close sooner if one team is able to obliterate the other.
You’ll be able to choose from hundreds of planes that appeared between the 1930s and the Korean War. There will be light, heavy, and ground assault planes. Each of those planes will also contain subclasses. You will be able to fly everything from biplanes to jets, but you can be sure that planes that have no business fighting one another won’t appear in the same matchmaking arenas.
Wargaming was quick to clarify that World of Warplanes is not a sim. You won’t have the option of flying from a cockpit view. The game definitely leans more towards the arcade school of flight combat. That isn’t to say that the game is unrealistic, though. Doing things like dropping bombs will make your aircraft lighter and more maneuverable.
The music also played an interesting part in the game, as it is entirely dynamic. Music will change depending on if you’re leisurely flying looking for an opponent, in the middle of a gunfight, or if you’re on the winning or losing team.
One interesting feature from our hands-off demo of the game was the ease in which you can switch between control choices. Without ever touching a settings menu, you can switch between flying with a mouse, the keyboard, or a flight stick no problem.
Wargaming has plans to unify its games, so in the future you should be able to share experience across World of Tanks and World of Warplanes, and someday even have the ground-based tanks fighting alongside the planes in the air.
World of Warplanes is currently in beta with plans for a full release at the end of this year. You can also look out for a World of Tanks update adding new modes and British tanks at the end of this month.
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