Well, the gods of gaming have decreed that I get to be a closed beta tester for World of War Planes, the second game in a series that started with the popular World of tanks.
"But SEC, how did you get to be awesome like this?"
How did I get to become a closed beta tester you ask? Simple, I completed the Challenge of Tanks. To do this I had to play through the M3 Lee, TWICE, the A20 and the T-34/85. Then I had to best a whole team of T110E5s in a loltraktor and win an assault on Prokhorovka, as the assaulting team. I also had to kill an old IS-4 in an easy 8.
But seriously, two of those things are impossible, and the easy 8 had a really hard time against the old IS-4 with 300mm of side armor (true story, bug that was never fixed until a patch ago). I really did play through all those awful tanks. All I did was fill out an application and answer some questions about planes.
I'll post some screen shots later but the interfaces are nearly identical to WoT, they just loo prettier. You start in your hangar with your three tier 1 aircraft. All are interwar bi-planes of the german, russian and american variety. They all have nearly identical stats. The research seems disabled, as does ammo types, so all you have to do to get to the next plane is save up enough credits. The costs are a lot lower but money comes in much slower it seems.
In the actual game nearly everything is done with the mouse, rolling, yawing etc. Its VERY sensitive, simply bumping it sends your plane into a death spiral or throws off your aim completely. The games themselves seem to be about hitting ground targets while shooting each other down. The games themselves boild down to chase each other in circles ineffectively shooting off your machine guns until someone gets lucky. The learning curve is brutally steep and the starting planes are rubbish. Just hitting someone is a mission and you do hardly any damage. The battles are quite small, with huge tier spreads, my first fight saw my bi plane pitted against Bf 109s and P-40s, tiers 4 and 5.
So far I despise it, its too hard to hit anyhting, the battles get repetitive and the match maker is 1000 times worse than WoT. Things might improve with time, but right now its not fun. If you want to play an arcade style aerial combat game I can't recommend Battlestations: Midway and battlestations: pacific highly enough, WoWP will take some time I think. I'll post updates on how I find it as I progress through.