#Xbox 360 tank battles free#

Stealth is another important element that can boost the fun. Using the terrain to your advantage, you can hide behind bushes for camouflage, use hills and buildings to hamper incoming artillery, and position your tank at an angle to spread out incoming fire and increase your chances of survival. Instead, thoughtful planning prevails more often than not. Barreling headlong into the middle of a firefight with your cannons thundering-even in a more heavily armored tank-is a quick way to end up a pile of smoldering scrap. Rather than being a chaotic free-for-all, World of Tanks takes a more deliberate, strategy-minded approach that favors tactical prowess over outright brazenness. With less to fiddle with on the control front, you have more room to focus and react when it counts. Swapping between a third-person view for short-range combat and a first-person, down-the-barrel perspective for long-range aiming is as speedy as it is seamless. At the same time, it takes only a few minutes in the short tutorial to get a feel for maneuvering and firing. This unpredictability is refreshing and plays nicely into how tactics unfold. Take a direct hit from an armor-piercing round, and your gunner might get killed, leaving you prone and unable to fire. Get a tread blown off, and you're either hamstrung or immobilized, depending on the damage level. Each historical tank sports an authentic visual design, and everything from how tanks handle to the way taking damage impacts their performance is realistic enough to satisfy most serious enthusiasts. The balance between simulation-level tank geekery and accessible arcade-style control is carefully tuned here.

It's a mechanic that gently pushed me to experiment with other tanks I was initially less interested in, broadening my armored horizons in the process.

#Xbox 360 tank battles free#

The upside is that you're free to grab another available tank in your arsenal and dive into a different match in the meantime. This prevents you from immediately using a tank that gets destroyed, which is a minor pain at times. Getting killed is serious business, however, since the annihilated tank is unavailable until the match is over. World of Tanks isn't much of a looker, but that's OK: you're gonna blow everything up anyway.

Sure, you might move along at a slow pace, but you're never very far from the action, and that's a great thing. This streamlined pacing helps counteract the sluggish nature of the many tanks you'll command. A diverse range of terrain layouts in each battlefield create natural choke points that speed you along toward the opening volleys of cannon fire, and once things get crazy, it's rare that a match bumps up against the 15-minute time limit before one side is declared the victor. World of Tanks' 15-on-15 matches get off to a zippy start, spurring your battalion to spread out quickly across the map to destroy all of your opponents or capture their base before they nab yours. But even if you're titillated by the brute force of hammering explosive shells into your adversaries until they erupt in flame, it's the thoughtful emphasis on strategy and the unpredictability of every encounter that keep matches interesting over the long haul. Why drive around trees, walls, and foes when you can crash straight through them unscathed, right? Raw power and heavy guns are the primal ingredients that drive World of Tanks, an online multiplayer shooter that reimagines what mid-20th-century warfare might be like if it were fought solely with rolling metal doom machines.

There's also an undeniable coolness to them. Burly and menacing, tanks are an enticing tool for turning the tide in any pitched military conflict.