New players will quickly reach tiers two, three, and four, but to unlock a tier five tank requires a serious time commitment. But the same can’t be said of its progression system, which - appropriately, for a game about tanks - demands a slow, trundling grind to earn new vehicles. Blitz is altogether a simpler, lighter affair than its more simulatory forefather, betraying its background as a mobile variant of the original World of Tanks, designed to make tanky combat playable on iOS and Android as well as PC. Playing through the tutorial ensures you’ll get to play with a tier two tank from one of the five countries represented - the USSR, Germany, Britain, the US, and Japan - but from there you’re on your own.Īnd it’s a long road ahead. New players start with just one tank in their garage: an old, slow creature that’s assigned to tier one of Blitz’s 10-tier system.

That’s unfortunate, as these experience points are the most valuable of Blitz’s currencies. Sadly, it’s far from exhaustive, and could leave new players confused about how best to use the experience points earned by controlling the tank planet’s denizens. The game opens with a breezy tutorial that rips players through how the various currencies are earned, bought, and deployed. Such a range of currency may be self-explanatory for the tanks themselves, as well as anyone else who has spent significant time on the surface of the World of Tanks, but it can be overwhelming for new visitors to the arcade-ier Blitz. World of Tanks: Blitz is absolutely rammed with the stuff: gold, for buying new tanks credits, for outfitting those tanks with ammunition and repair items experience, for giving tanks nicer guns or better engines, and spare parts, for sticking those new weapons onto the tanks in question. In fact, it seems like the only thing the inhabitants of the World of Tanks value more than organised conflicts to the death between teams of multiple tanks is cold, hard currency. They were also able to develop their own advanced economy. Not only did they manage to build a functional society on their planet despite the lack of opposable thumbs - or appendages in general - but out in the reaches of space, far from Earth, they were also able to split their organised conflicts up into two forms: the bigger battles represented by the original World of Tanks, and smaller seven-on-seven conflicts seen in the simplified and mobile-friendly World of Tanks: Blitz. The tanks of World of Tanks are an evolutionary success story. Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they've been changed for better or worse.

World of tanks blitz updates