World of Tanks Review

Today I have another guest post for you. This one comes in from Penny Cooper and is a review of the MMO blast-em-up "World of Tanks". Take it away, Penny:


Game: World of Tanks
Publisher: Wargaming.net
Type: Team based MMO
Score: 7/10

When video game makers release a game for free-to-play, many assume it not of the best quality. But World of Tanks breaks that notion and exuberates a grandeur that you are unlikely to have expected of a free game! What makes World of Tanks a class apart from other MMOs is its graphics. A straight “A” for the effort the makers have put in designing the tanks and the maps. World of Tanks can surprise you, if you play it without any expectations in mind.

An Introduction to the game

World of Tanks is a game developed by Wargaming.net, a Russian game studio. It is a massively multiplayer online game which is set up in the period of World War II. The tanks of Germany, the US and the Soviet Union are designed accurately keeping in mind the actual war tanks of that period.

Gameplay

It is a First person shooter game where instead of being a human shooter, you will be a tank! This might seem funny for someone who has never heard of this game, but once you start playing, it keeps you hooked. There are more than 100 tanks to choose from and up to 60 players can be involved per battle. There are two teams, each consisting of a maximum of 30 players. The first mode is a deathmatch, where each team is assigned a player randomly. The eventual rounds are the clan and flag deathmatches, where the player has to play hard to fit in the team he/she likes.

As a player, you have to find enemy tanks and destroy them. It surprisingly helps in busting stress but then again, the experience depends on the rest of the players too.

City of Steam sneak peek thoughts

On February 28 the City of Steam "Sneak Peek" event kicked off.
The sneak peek lets us get a very early glimpse of the steampunk MMO, allowing players to jump into the steamy world of the game and go slay monsters and explore dungeons, all from the comfort of your internet browser.

City of Steam is indeed a browser based game, but while "browser based" might conjure up horrible images of "Farmville" in your head, don't think that this design choice means that City of Steam is a ghastly looking game.
While it's clear that City of Steam does not stand a chance of living up to the graphical splendor of something like Star Wars: The Old Republic, it manages to make itself look perfectly presentable and functional as it chugs along in your Chrome window.

You won't confuse City of Steam with Guild Wars 2, but the graphics aren't bad for a browser game

The game itself reminds me of something a bit like a mix between the original Diablo, with several elements from the standard MMO tool box bolted on.
You'll be moving around your character from an overhead or behind-the-back view by left clicking on the ground. When nefarious enemies rear their brassy gear endowed heads you'll left click on them to fight them with one of three standard attacks, or you can use your skills from the quick slot bar at the bottom of the screen.

Interview with the developers of Guns of Icarus Online

I'm very happy to be able to bring you an interview with Joseph Lieberman from Muse Games, makers of Guns of Icarus Online. You may remember that I had the first gameplay trailer from this game up on the site back in November.
With its dieselpunk setting and first person piloting of giant airships the game is looking to be quite the unique experience and after this interview I'm even more curious to see the finished product.

First off, can you tell us a bit about what Guns of Icarus Online is all about? Obviously flying the airships is the key gameplay element, but what sort of tasks will you be using your nifty ship for? 

There are two modes of play that together embody what Guns of Icarus Online is all about. On the smaller scale, the game is about the thrill of flying and moment-to-moment airship combat, with its strategy, skill and frantic action, and the teamwork of a well-knit crew where everyone has a job to do.  These experiences are the core of the PvP combat mode that we will aim to release first. In the campaign mode on the larger scale, which we will expand to, the game is about the politics of alliance and conquest, and the economics of nurturing the growth of struggling towns while increasing your own profits through trade. As the captain of a merchant ship, you will be the one that towns depend on to deliver the supplies they need to survive. Lose the cargo en route, and shortages will hamper growth and affect the local economy. As a warship captain, you’ll be on the front line defending or expanding your faction’s territory, protecting merchant fleets so shipments get where they’re going -- or raiding them and bringing the spoils home.

Steampunk and Dieselpunk seems to be enjoying quite the surge of popularity these days, which means that the setting in Guns of Icarus Oline is not necessarily as unusual a sight as it has been before. What would you say really sets the Guns of Icarus Online world and setting apart from the standard steampunk/dieselpunk themes of greasy engines and smoking mechanics?

Steampunk and dieselpunk were starting points for our concept, but they’re only a part of the aesthetic. This obviously isn’t a high Victorian steampunk setting that’s all gaslight and gleaming brass, and it’s not an Atomic Age dieselpunk fantasy setting, either, although it has elements of both. The world of Guns of Icarus Online is what you get some 300 years after history has basically been arrested at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, so that’s the upper limit of technological progress. In the war, humanity essentially bombed itself back to the Dark Ages and had to build up from there.

Some parts of turn-of-the-century technology still exist or can be salvaged or recreated with a lot of effort, like electricity. At the same time, without access to global trade and production, most of the world is living a pre-industrial agrarian or even hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with animal labor and maybe some limited steam and diesel power -- all in the ruins of an urban, industrial world that has been iced over, desertified, and thoroughly scavenged. Guns of Icarus Online also draws on a broad range of cultural influences, as the current population is the product of centuries of upheaval and migration. We’ve got elements of European, Middle Eastern, and Asian cultures all remixed in different ways, from the fashions to the architecture to the place names. We don’t think it’ll be quite like anything you’ve seen before!

A steampunk airship flying game is something we don’t see every day. From the gameplay footage you’ve made available it looks like you’re going with a very special kind of gameplay that is focused on controlling your ship from the first person, as opposed to something like Eve Online that is all 3rd person with UI to handle all the ship controls. Can you give us a more detailed look into how players will be operating the airships in Guns of Icarus Online and how that will impact the gaming experience?

We’ve had quite a few long, philosophical, late-night discussions about what is an MMO, what is an MMORPG, an RPG, a MMOFPS, a non-MMO -- an MO? -- and finally, what is Guns of Icarus Online?

One thing that’s clear is that this is not your typical third-person, open-world, mouse-driven MMO. We’re not Eve Online or World of Warcraft. What we’re doing is bringing team-based, match-driven, FPS-style play to what in the campaign mode will become a persistent shared world, with some more traditional RPG trappings like trade and crafting.

Exclusive Preview of City of Steam - Your chance to play a mechanical Dwarf!

There are only so many traditional fantasy based MMO's that one man can stomach. When you're walking through a magical Eleven forest for the 24th time, you can start to suffer from some real Tolkien related fatigue.
Enter "City of Steam".
This free to play browser based MMO is going to take your Elves, your Dwarves and your medieval themed fantasy world, and process them in a giant, hissing piece of brass decorated machinery, spitting out a distinct steampunk setting, where the world is one giant machine and one of the base elements is rust (earth is so quaint).

Trains and airships. This isn't your average Lord of the Rings fantasy world

City of Steam is being developed by the China based "Mechanist Games" and has been in development for a couple of years.
I've had a chance to interview lead designer David Lindsay and Ian Morgenheim, who has been part of the process of creating the RPG books that the game is based on.

Q: First off, can you tell us about how you came up with the background for City of Steam?

A: City of Steam is actually the third iteration of the a setting that began as simply "Industrial Age Fantasy". That first version was a... bloated unwieldy beast of a thing! It had horns, tentacles and a monstrous index, I tell you! Imagine the Necronomicon from Army of Darkness: Painful to open, terrible to behold, but definitely a force to be reckoned with. But as a first product, and a solo writer/developer, it was a massive learning curve and a great experience.
I keep it in a locked trunk so it will never see the light of day, but without making any of those mistakes, today's game would never have been possible at all.