One moment we had seven vehicles compared to their two. I looked away, and when I looked back we were down to only three. Out of nowhere, the Wolverine had appeared and wiped out four of our vehicles. All of our big tanks were gone, leaving only me, and lightly-armoured scout tank, and our vulnerable artillery, hiding back at our base and sending shells arcing overhead. There was nothing for it: the scout and I would have to try to capture the enemy base ourselves. We cautiously approached the base, destroyed the enemy artillery vehicle, and began the capture; a green progress bar showed we had about a minute before winning. At that same moment, our artillery was destroyed - the Wolverine was at our base. With only one vehicle capturing our base, he couldn't hope to win, so there was only one thing he could do: find us and kill us before we could complete the capture. Bravely, the scout volunteered to go and slow him down, let me complete the capture on my own while he held the Wolverine back. He found the dreaded tank destroyer only a few hundred metres away from us, and a brief and brutal gunfight ensued. My ally fought well, reducing the Wolverine's armour to about 15%, but the more heavily armed vehicle won. I was alone on the field with a vastly superior vehicle only seconds away.

A message popped up in my chat box: "Please win this for me. Get that Wolverine." It was the player from the now destroyed scout tank. Another message from another teammate, still watching even though his vehicle had been blown up long before. Then another. Five of my teammates were sending me messages, encouraging me and begging me to win. With only twenty seconds until the capture was complete, I knew the Wolverine would rush in. There were three ways into the base, but one was in a straight line from the last place it had been seen. Staying within the capture zone, I sidled up to a rocky hillside, trying to make myself as small a target as possible, and trained my gun on the valley that the Wolverine was certain to come down. The seconds ticked away... Fifteen seconds until capture... Ten... Five... Was he coming at all? Had he decided to concede? Did he take the long way in order to flank me? Suddenly, there he was, barrelling around the hill right in front of my gun. I fired. I missed.

I watched the shell pass harmlessly mere centimetres about the Wolverine's turret. "Oh well," I thought. "I tried." The Wolverine fired back. It missed too. Waiting for my gun to reload was the longest four seconds of my life. I suspected the Wolverine's gun would take longer than mine to reload, but I didn't know for sure. I waited for the countdown to hit zero, and then desperately fired again. The Wolverine exploded.

I had won. Five teammates - strangers I will never meet, who had been assigned to the same team as me by random chance - cheered for me. As for me, I could only grin at the poetry of it: that victory had just given me over 10% of the experience I needed to buy a Wolverine of my own. Back in the real world, my heart was pounding in my chest and I felt slightly dizzy. It was one of the most visceral physical reactions I have ever had from a game. My body was so flooded with adrenaline that I had to get up and pace around the house for a while to work it out of my system. This, then, is World of Tanks, a free-to-play online game for Windows PC and, more recently, Xbox 360, with publisher Wargaming.net promising more platforms in future. The meat of the game is random fifteen-versus-fifteen tank battles, pitting teams of nimble scouts, stealthy tank destroyers, and powerful heavy tanks against each other. Progress through the game occurs through several technology trees. When starting a new account, a range of base level free tanks are available, and fighting in battles with those tanks will earn you experience points, which can be used to research improvements for your tanks and, eventually, more powerful vehicles. Experience in those vehicles will unlock even more powerful vehicles, and so on.

All of the vehicles featured in the game are real, beginning from the origins of tanks in the 1920s and 1930s and progressing through to the 1950s and early 1960s. Some, such as the German Leopard and the British Churchill, were common on the battlefields of World War II, while some were only built in small batches for testing, or even single prototypes that never went into production. A few were never actually built in the real world, and were recreated in the game from historical blueprints. Vehicles from seven different countries are currently included in the game at present, with more promised. They are rated across ten different tiers, with tier I being the most basic and tier X the most expensive and powerful. There are five basic types of vehicles: light tanks, which function as swift scouts; heavy tanks, which are the slow heavy-hitters of the group; medium tanks, which fill the gap between the previous two; tank destroyers, which are generally slow and heavily armoured and are designed to lie in wait and ambush more mobile vehicles; and finally SPGs, or self-propelled guns, which are slow, lightly-armoured artillery that fire in parabolic arcs across the entire battlefield, using allied tanks as their eyes. Even within these broad categories there is a lot of variety; some light tanks are slow, and some tank destroyers are quick and nimble, for example. players will usually be able to find a range of vehicles that suit their playing style, and with matches never lasting longer than fifteen minutes, it's easy to play a variety of different types. World of Tanks is genuinely free to play. A patient player can see everything the game has to offer without spending a single cent of real-world money. That said, real money helps. Generally, spending real money will help you to progress faster, and those with no spare time at all can simply buy a higher tier tank and jump straight in, instead of investing hundreds of hours getting to the same point for free. While it really is possible to play entirely for free, the temptation to spend a few dollars is strong. This is a seriously addictive game, and making progress can take a long time. Dropping a few bucks here and there to accelerate your progress will help you to get to that mouth-wateringly powerful new tank that much sooner.

The question to ask, then, is whether the gameplay itself is actually any good. After fighting in almost a thousand online battles over the past month, I am happy to report that the answer is yes. Map designs are clever, encouraging a variety of different playing styles, and having a mixture of tank types in the same fight makes them wonderfully unpredictable. My only real reservation is in the automated random team creation. The matchmaking seems awfully warped at times, pitting a team of more experienced players against relative newbies, who are them steamrollered by the more skilled players. Weak scout tanks can sometimes be dropped into battles with tough heavies many tiers higher, since there are very few high-tier scouts. These random teams can be incredibly frustrating, as well. Sometimes when playing artillery I will watch as the entire team runs off into the field, leaving nobody behind to guard the base and keep the artillery safe. The opposite can be just as bad, when the player who has the best tank in your team refuses to put himself at risk and instead just hides back at base, letting the rest of the team get picked off. Sometimes, however, it all comes together. Like my story above with the Wolverine, random chance will sometimes throw you into a great team that communicates well, coordinates their efforts, responds to requests for backup, and puts the team victory ahead of their own personal point-scoring. When this happens, World of Tanks is simply wonderful. All the frustrations of the terrible team that runs off and lets the base get captured are forgiven when you get that perfect team that works well together. It does make it a little more sad, then, when your next battle is with a pack of idiots with no concept of how to work together as a team. Having seen just how good it can be, it makes the bad experiences downright heartbreaking. Still, the memory of those great games can keep you going, pushing on through the bad ones.

Of course, random matches are not the only way to play. Three friends can form a platoon, which allows them to go into the same 15 vs 15 random battles together. larger groups are called companies, and rather than random battles, there is a company battle mode which pits one group against another. World of Tanks also has an extremely active clan community, and these clans can even compete in international tournament events. For the casual player, though, there is a lot to enjoy in World of Tanks. The learning curve can be very steep, however, and it's not unusual to spend the first hundred of so battles dying a lot. Even with a thousand battles under my belt, I still consider myself to be quite new and inexperienced - there are players out there with over 30,000 battles on record (that's around 5,000 hours, about two years in a full-time nine-to-five job). Now and then, after suffering a string of frustrating losses, I will feel discouraged and wonder why I am bothering. Then, a magical moment will happen, like the story above, and i will see just how compelling and exciting this game can be at its best. If you'd like to have a go at it yourself, you can download it for free from worldoftanks.asia. - James "DexX" Dominguez

Screen Play is on Twitter: @jamesjdominguez