Recently the sound of battle was heard by gaming media from around the country, calling us to Sydney to help Wargaming celebrate the launch of World of Tanks on PlayStation 4, but this was by no means a simple party, we first had to earn our right to play, by entering into the hard, ragged and sometimes messy world of Paintball.

The events on the paintball field were hectic, yet oddly soothing, when the first whistle blew, sounding the start of our mock battle, people were very hesitant to remove themselves, from whatever cover they had been able to find, but then as the seconds ticked by, more and more people ventured out, seeing what they could do. I myself, found a nice bit of cover and started to take shots at whomever I could spot from the opposite team, it was tedious work to be sure, but it kept me safe and did let me have my chance at shooting people, relatively removed from the battle, but that was not going to be for long. Mere moments after the second whistle sound echoed throughout, indicating that the respawn period was over, I managed to take a shot right to the face from someone I had been shooting at, while they managed to get me, I was unable to get them and thus I removed myself from the battle, thinking about how best I could get them back next time.


When I was removed from the battle and confined to the dead zone, I had a chance to see who else was wearing paint, while I was shot in the face, I was perhaps one of the least covered, there were some that had amassed quite a collection of paint splats on both their front and back and even a few unlucky people that had paint throughout their hair. It did not take long for the first round to end, giving victory to the green team, over my black team, but we all felt better for having gotten the first match out of the way. We restocked the guns, took a breather and then headed to the next field, for a different type of battle. Located somewhere in the middle was a case, which we were informed contained a bomb, for the team to win, the bomb would have to be collected and then ran to the opposing teams base, like a reverse capture the flag and once again, the black team proved to be outmatched by the green team, but as luck would have it, the green team did not fully understand the rules and as such, ran the bomb back to their own base, securing a black team victory, at one all, things were getting interesting.

The third round had us on yet another new field, with tanks scattered about, which would have been quite ironic, if they were actual war tanks and not water tanks, but still there was a little wave of chuckling that went through the group. The round actually lasted quite a long time, but in the end, the green team were victorious, but it was within this match that I sustained an injury that had me removed from the game, I was shot in the throat and days later it still twinged with a soreness I had not felt for quite some time. After that match was done, in order to use up the last of the shots we had, we went straight back out for a final match, sadly I was out after only a few shots, because I had about 4 shots in when we started. From the side lines, the black team was finally working and we dominated the match, to which the final results were black with two people left and green with one, some very impressive tactics from the black team, resulted in the win, leaving us with a two all result for the day. While some people walked away without much in the way of marks, there were a few that collected quite an impressive amount of welts and bruises, but all walked away with a sense of satisfaction.


Of course, the entire point of the day was to celebrate the release of World of Tanks on PlayStation 4, so with our attempt at being soldiers done, we headed back into the Sydney CBD to a gaming bar, Spawn Point and then were able to go hands on with the game ourselves. There were a number of machines set up, some on smaller screens and one on a projector and right away there was quite the amount of evidence that some of those in attendance were quite adept at controlling the tanks across the battlefields, I was not one of them.

The game itself, looks like it does on the Xbox One and plays just as smoothly, sadly the location had some issues with its network, which resulted with some lag interfering with the matches from time to time, but all in all, the game ran without an issue. Of course, while there was plenty of people familiar with the game, there were also a number of those who were not and it was quite funny to watch those people attempting to play the game for the first time. There was a singular instance of someone attempting to sneak around a house in order to take a shot at an enemy tank, all in all a good theory, though what stopped it was when they managed to crash through the corner of the house, rather than around it, causing them to curse and loose concentration, it gave the enemy tank time to shoot.


As the day wore on, I had come to enjoy watching the game, with the tactics that the advanced players were using proving to be effective against almost all the enemy tanks around, even the less advanced players were enjoying their time with the game. While I am not as adept as other with the tanks, my time playing was enjoyable and given that anyone with a PlayStation 4 connected to the internet can play for free, it was hard to walk away from the event saying anything bad about the game. If you have any format that the game is available on, then I suggest that you give it a go as soon as you can, while you may never be able to drive a tank in real life, this is perhaps the closest you will get and no one can really ask for more than that.