War Thunder VR Review and Setup Guide

Today we’re going to be diving into a really well known PC game, War Thunder, and finding out if playing it in VR makes it any better. War Thunder is a combination Tank fighting, air combat, and ship battle simulator. It’s got a ton of vehicles to drive and realistic damage and penetration models, not to mention a huge community. Most importantly it’s got VR support, and that doesn’t get talked about as often as you’d think with a game this huge. So I couldn’t help but wonder, is War Thunder VR any better than flat screen War Thunder?

Well it… kind of is. Land Battles are a little better in VR, and sea Battles aren’t enhanced by adding Virtual Reality at all. Air Battles, however, are fantastic in VR. Despite a little jank, Virtual Reality makes fighting in the air much better. If you’re curious on how to set up War Thunder on the PC, or get a few more details on just why VR can make some gamemodes of War Thunder better, read on.

VR Setup

If you want to get to the actual review, skip ahead to the “Land Battles” Section below. Here we’re going to go over how to play War Thunder in VR so that it’s comfortable and looks as nice as we can get it. After that I’ll also talk about a little background on the game in case you’re totally unfamiliar with it. Feel free to come back here if combining War Thunder and VR still sounds interesting after the review and you’d like to set it up for yourself.

First let’s talk a little about how we’re gonna do this. I’m not a massive War Thunder fan. You’ll see from the vehicles that I’ll be using that I’ve played it a little before. I’m not a master War Thunder player by any means, but I’ve played it a bit before on flat screen and know my way around the game.

As for my setup, I’ll be using Meta Air Link to stream the game to my Oculus Quest 2. I’ll also be sitting in a chair right in front of my mouse and keyboard, so a setup using an Oculus Link Cable is just as viable to play War Thunder VR. This setup should work for any VR Headset or HMD that you have.

The first thing I’ll say about VR War Thunder is that you should get rid of any notion of using your VR controllers to play it. It is practically impossible to control your vehicle in land, air, or sea with them. You have to use a mouse and keyboard or joystick to control the game. Not only are there a ton of buttons you’ll need to have access to, way more than there are on any VR controller, but the joysticks are way too sensitive to control your vehicle with. Even after playing with the sensitivity settings I could never get it to feel smooth so that aiming and turning wasn’t extreme pain. Use a mouse and keyboard, trust me.

Making War Thunder VR Look Better

As for graphics, I noticed that the bitrate is a little low when running War Thunder VR through Steam and sometimes there were some frame drops, which is really noticeable and irritating in VR. As an alternative I downloaded the Gaijin client to run War Thunder through, and after setting the “VR Mode” toggle in the settings, it ran on my headset. There is also a setting to turn Camera Shake up or down in VR, which I turned all the way down to avoid nausea (there’ll still be some of that later on in this article). There’s also a slider for “Sense of Flight in VR”. I’m honestly not sure what that does. I didn’t notice any changes with it turned to 100 or 0.

Otherwise my computer was able to run the game on “Maximum” settings, and it looked pretty good and no longer had any framerate drop issues. If you want to get really specific on how to set your graphics settings for VR, check out this forum thread, it helped me a lot. There was still some obvious pixilation on some details, though the general visual experience was not terrible, though not entirely optimized.

Oh and if you were running War Thunder through Steam and want to migrate your steam account to a Gaijin account to not lose your progress on the Gaijin launcher, check out this guide.

War Thunder Gamemodes

I’ll be covering each game in Arcade mode, as that’s the mode that most will play War Thunder in, and also because I’m… well I’m not very good at War Thunder.

With the setup out of the way let’s talk generally about what battles in War Thunder look like. Each gamemode sets a bunch of player controlled vehicles on one team (all of around the same strength based on a ranking system) against an equal amount of vehicles on the enemy team in a variety of maps. They fight over between 1 and 3 capture points around the map in Land or Naval Battles. In Air Battles the objective is to destroy enemy land targets before your opponents destroy yours.

Land Battles (Tanks)

Alright so you’re all caught up, even non War Thunder enthusiasts know what this game is about and how to play it in VR. So how do Tank Battles in War Thunder VR compare to regular War Thunder?

Well it definitely looks cooler. As a VR lover I’m a little biased, but basically everything looks cooler in VR. You feel like you could reach out and touch other tanks that are close to you. Mountains and trees just naturally seem bigger, and so do the other vehicles near you. Small tanks look and feel smaller, and big tanks look and feel bigger.

Everything is more immediate and more impressive. Plane crashing into the ground? The fireball it creates might look cool on the flat screen. In VR it is truly impressive. The immersive nature of VR just takes all the sights and sounds of a giant tank battlefield to another level. With War Thunder’s giant battles, it’s a great way to make the whole experience look more impressive.

What made the whole experience really awesome was the ability to just look in any direction without having to use the freelook key, just by turning your head around. It was downright liberating to freely look around any which way so naturally, even the grass was fun to look at.

This all does come at a price though. Not only do you have to deal with the VR headset on your face, but War Thunder is clearly not supremely optimized for VR. How you interact with the controls is not changed at all, and neither are the HUD elements on your screen. This means you’ll have to turn your entire head to find information that you could get at a glance on the flat screen. An option to tack the minimap, or other HUD elements to your view would have been a nice choice to have.

Instead you need to manually look down and to the right to see your minimap, down to the left to look at your tank’s status, you get the idea. Really this VR mode for War Thunder only replaces your previously flat screen view with a VR camera. While that’s sufficient to get some of the majesty of VR immersion into the game, some VR quality of life features would have been nice.

There’s not a first person VR camera option for your tank, the closest you can get is a view right on top of the turret. You could spend your whole game in the gunner’s view I guess, but either way losing the third person view would be a disadvantage, so no big loss there. First person would have looked very nice though.

Otherwise the VR view can be a bit jarring, it would be nice if there was an option to add blinders with turning or moving your head suddenly for those who might get motion sickness in VR. Mostly it can make it hard to aim. Zooming in to aim makes your view very unstable and shaky. This is a drawback, especially in a game like War Thunder where a precisely aimed shot can be the difference between an enemy destroyed and your round bouncing off harmlessly.

Aviation Battles (Planes)

While VR doesn’t add too much to the land battles, where it really shines is in the air.

Air Battles are INCREDIBLE in War Thunder VR. Out of all the game modes they are by far the most impressive to experience in VR. At this point I don’t even want to play War Thunder’s air battles on a flat screen anymore. That experience just pales in comparison to how great Virtual Reality makes Aviation in War Thunder.

Just like in the Land Battles, looking around the battlefield is definitely more impressive. An enemy plane zooming past you feels like an actual plane zooming past you. There’s a weird claustrophobia to flying low to the ground, whizzing over trees and past anti-aircraft batteries. Glowing tracers look beautiful criss-crossing in the air, and that’s even in third person view. It gets even better.

That’s because what makes War Thunder’s air battles truly immersive in VR is the first person cockpit camera. You’re no longer shackled to a third person or overly restrictive gunner’s view. In your plane you can have the view of the actual pilot in it. Your pilot has a body, and that body moves when you move the plane, actually manipulating the controls.

The control panel of the actual plane you are flying is right there in front of you, with all the gun sights, compasses, and dials that an actual pilot would use. You can use actual gunsights to fire your weapons and it is incredible. Looking out over the massive landscape from your cockpit, looking down at the ground rushing past the wings of your plane practically feels like you’re actually flying, except there’s no wind running through your hair. If you want a fantastic first person flying experience then it is here in War Thunder VR, for free!

Of course there are a couple of issues here too though. While the first person mode is incredible, otherwise all of the problems that the Tank battles had with the tacked-on nature of the VR support are here as well. You still have to crane your neck to view HUD elements.

While aiming in first person is incredibly immersive, it’s also not the best way to fight or travel in general. I found myself switching between third and first person depending on the situation. Looking around without having the plane itself get in the way so that I could see and get a lead on opponents was just a lot easier in third person. Often staying in first person view just made the game harder, despite how great it felt to play.

Still, first person is better at some things, like shooting at ground targets (more on that later). Oh, and I should mention, there’s also another camera mode that makes your whole plane disappear except for some navigational tools overlaid on your screen, and it’s kind of like flying a disembodied head. If you want to play in first person with fewer drawbacks, then that might be for you.

Still, even the third person mode is really impressive and fun to play, so I didn’t really mind. The one thing I did mind was how difficult the aiming can be, especially when firing at ground targets. Now I know that it’s generally easier to destroy targets on the ground with bombs, but it’s not uncommon to take them down with direct cannon and machine gun fire. Also I consistently ran into a problem where the bomb reticle that is normally overlayed on the ground around where your bombs should land was floating in the air and basically unuseable.

When directly firing at the ground your target is so small and so far away that it’s hard to shoot at it accurately, and you don’t have much time (or ammunition) to take them down before you have to pull up or your gun overheats and jams. You might think, “Well obviously just zoom in so you can get a better look and shoot more accurately.”

Well if you ever do that I hope you don’t vomit easily. Zooming in on a tank that was standing still was a little nauseating, but zooming in while piloting a moving plane? It’s practically a one way ticket to motion sickness city.

There’s absolutely no camera smoothing, so the tiniest movement of your head makes your whole view rock and shake drastically. Trying to zoom in when you’re in third person generally just gets you a closeup of your plane, so zooming in when in first person is really your best option, and it is jarring to say the least. Good luck hitting much on the ground in War Thunder VR. Honestly just forget the zoom button altogether, your head and stomach will thank you.

Bluewater Fleet and Coastal Fleet (Ship Combat)

Unfortunately the Virtual Reality fun stops at Ship Combat. Where VR Land Combat has some problems but is serviceable and VR Air Combat is fantastic despite a few bugs and a little jankiness, VR Ship Combat is not enhanced by Virtual Reality. War Thunder’s ship combat in VR is actually worse than it is on the flat screen.

Not only does Ship Combat have the already existing problems that Land and Air combat have, but almost nothing is added by VR. There is only third person and the gunner’s view now, and any ship larger than a Patrol Boat is so large that it always gets in the way when you are trying to aim. Since the distances you’ll be firing at are so large, generally at least a kilometer but often farther, you will constantly be using the gunner view and zooming as much as you can.

Though you do have a quasi-first person view on smaller ships like little Patrol Boats which is alright. Though no matter what size of ship you are piloting you’ll end up in the gunner’s view, zooming a lot.

Like I’ve said, zooming in War Thunder doesn’t translate well into Virtual Reality. While looking at your huge ship is kind of cool, it gets very hard to control because you are constantly forced to change the angle of your view to fire broadsides and torpedoes, which come out of the side of a large ship. Patrol boats kind of function like a sea bound tank and so are less impaired by this issue, but the constant zooming and firing while moving is nauseating and unpleasant in VR.

The environment and effects aren’t particularly nicer in VR either. Looking across the water in first person might have been cool, though impractical, but from the third person view water is water, and the fighting is so much more spread out that the sense of majesty of Airborne and Land battles is gone. I had a headache after a single match, and even if you are immune to motion sickness there’s really not much to be gained by playing Sea Battles in VR.

Well there you have it, that’s how War Thunder VR stacks up. Land Battles are pretty good in VR, Air Battles are great, and you’re better off staying on the flat screen for Naval Combat. Overall I’d say that the addition of VR to War Thunder was a great idea. Though it could have used a little more love in implementation, it’s still a fun experience to try at least once, and hey, it’s free, so why not?