Armored Warfare is the latest competitor to Wargaming’s World of Tanks in their free-to-play tank arcade genre. I am happy to say that Obsidian Entertainment has produced a worthy competitor against the single dominant game in the genre. Inevitable comparisons will be made since Armored Warfare is designed to directly compete with World of Tanks.

The game came on open beta on October 8th, and is accessible to everyone with a sufficient PC.

Armored Warfare features from post-WWII light tanks such as the Soviet PT-76 to modern behemoths such as the British Challenger 2. Unlike World of Tanks, tech trees are organized by playstyle, not nation in a dealer system.

Perhaps the main selling point of Armored Warfare is the 5-man ROFL-stomp co-op gameplay in PvE mode. In which players secure objectives in order to win. Player-versus-Environment mode is offered in three flavors of difficulty, creatively named: easy, medium, and hard. Obsidian announced they will include “insane” difficulty in later patches.

Though in order to do well in this game mode, as far as easy and medium mode is concerned, you just need to have a high sustained damage gun and spawn-camp against the bots. As fun as it is, it gets bland. Developers need to work on where they spawn the bots in order.

The developers also took the time to write brief backstories to every one of the co-op missions. It is one of the many irrelevant, but interesting details to the game that players can appreciate, especially in a free-to-play game.

In World of Tanks, whether you do well or not playing artillery is more down to luck than skill. As a result, in the World of Tanks community, artillery players are affectionately known as “sky cancer”.

In Armored Warfare, it is a different story. As far as firepower is concerned, artillery class vehicles are equal to main battle tank class vehicles. Players also get a few seconds of warning before getting shelled. They can fire smoke rounds to break line of sight for teammates that need it. Illumination rounds to spot enemy vehicles in the targeted area. The developers designed artillery class vehicles more as a support class vehicle than anything else.

To scale, Armored Warfare maps are bigger than World of Tanks maps. This is because vehicles featured in Armored Warfare are fast, faster, and fast on steroids. Since Armored Warfare is powered by a modified version of the Cry Engine, the maps look absolutely amazing. Map environment are mostly destructible. From trees to oil rigs to even some houses are all destructible. Fallen trees and bushes provide concealment for the vehicles.

Vehicles in this game feature different kinds of armor, which adds a new level of sophistication to the gameplay. Composite armor boosts the effective armor against all shell types. Explosive reactive armor and cage armor renders ammunition of the shaped charge category, like anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) and high explosive anti-tank shells (HEAT) useless. It is recommended for new players to research how different types of ammunition works against different types of armor.

Like World of Tanks, you need to penetrate your target in order for your shell or missile to do damage, unless you are firing HE. Unlike World of Tanks, however, it is possible to overpenetrate your target and deal less damage. This eliminates the possibility of a World of Tanks-esque premium ammunition system, where ammunition bought with large sums of in-game currency gets a huge penetration boost.

The most frustrating things in shooter games is getting shot at by something you cannot see. Armored Warfare addresses that by giving an indication whenever the player is spotted by the enemy team. Though Armored Warfare needs to work on making the spotting system work as intended.

The more annoying aspects in Armored Warfare is vehicle collisions. Both parties take a sizable damage just by scraping paint with each other, which is extremely agitating since most vehicles in Armored Warfare are really fast. It seems like Armored Warfare developers are still experimenting different algorithms for ramming damage.

There had been numerous reports of bugs in maps, the UI, and garage. The typical stuff you would expect in a game in its open beta phase. That didn’t stop me from playing the game since you’d get a new patch almost every two weeks. Patch notes provided by the developers are very detailed.

Perhaps the most attractive aspect of Armored Warfare from a World of Tanks player’s perspective is the fact that Armored Warfare developers listen to criticism and respond accordingly more so than World of Tanks developers. The effort Armored Warfare developers put in is very visible.

Armored Warfare directly targets the World of Tanks audience, and has been pretty successful at it. Hopefully the competition would raise the quality of both games.

by JUSTIN KWOK