We got in the trenches with the World of Tanks Beta and prepared a full battle report!

It's hard not to love World of Tanks' concept. Picture this: you own a garage full of tanks! Does that get you excited? If not, you'll probably want to skip the rest of this article, but if you have ever, in any way, seen a tank and thought, "that is awesome," then read on, my friend.

In World of Tanks you own up to 150 tanks from the golden era of tanks, World War II to the Korean War. Beside this garage is a barracks where you employ teams of tank operators that you send out to different tank battles against other players to earn cash and glory. Along the way you will need to use your experience and money to research new tank technologies, like better armor plating, bigger engines and larger cannons, to make your tanks even stronger. Researching upgrades will unlock the ability to buy the next historically accurate tank evolution. Awesome. And we haven't even started talking about how great the actual tank combat is.

Probably the most unique part of World of Tanks, the element that separates it from other competitive online shooting games, is that everything in the game stems from your garage. You're not just a player going into an endless stream of the same death matches. If your tank gets destroyed in a battle, you can, and should, bail on the match and start a new one with a different tank. You have a garage full of them, after all.

It almost feels weird, getting into the habit of quitting matches once you've died, but World of Tanks encourages it. However, you'll have to come back and use the credits you've earned to repair that damaged tank if you want to use it again.

Tank crew members that you hire will gain experience and get better at their jobs the more you use them, but if you place them in a different tank model, they'll have to orient themselves to the new tank and will take a hit to their abilities. It all leads to a feeling of realism, like you really do own a garage full of tanks and soldiers.

The stars of the game are the armored vehicles. Wargaming.net has had an obvious love affair full of diligent research when it comes to these steel behemoths and everything is pretty historically accurate. The beginning tanks are dumpy, little metal boxes and the late game tanks are god-like fortresses on treads. We love how every new tank you unlock is the historical evolution of the previous tank. The attention to detail is thorough.

Everything on a tank, from the engine power to the radio distance, can be tweaked and upgraded. And little things like turret rotation speed make a huge difference. Try doing circles around a tank, but be unable to get the first shot off because your turret is too slow. Maddening. Often, the difference between the living and the scrap metal is who can land accurate shots first. A tank standing still can fire a much more accurate shot, but is a sitting duck for other tanks and Self Propelled Guns (SPGs). We say all this to help you understand how deeply nuanced the tank combat is.