Fighting other players when both sides are on foot is probably where the best moments are found in War Rock. Snipers are the kings of reaching out and tagging people halfway across the map, but most sniper rifles have a small degree of inaccuracy at long range making pin-point head shots at long range a matter of a fair amount of skill and a small amount of luck. The Engineer, Medic, and Assault classes all need to get into the thick of things to be effective and that leads to some frenzied combat and a great deal of fun. The Heavy class starts off with a rocket launcher that is worthless when fighting players, but can be upgraded with better weapons (provided you spend the dinar) as you rank up. Infantry can sprint by double tapping forward and can roll using the shift key, both of which take some away from your character's current stamina. Rolling through a doorway or around a corner while fleeing can often mean the difference between living and a messy head wound, and is a useful ability to have while prone as you can roll sideways into and out of cover. The weapons handle in a largely arcade-like manner themselves, and when you throw in the roll feature infantry combat looks more like it was directed by John Woo than like any form of realism. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, as the genre already has enough realism in its title base to last it for quite some time.

The biggest problem with War Rock is that the title seems dated at best in it's design and woefully underdeveloped at worst. The engine itself maxes out at a 1024x768 resolution and while the graphics aren't “terrible” they also wouldn't have looked modern two years ago. The in-game server browser can only be described as “functional” at best with a decisive lack of other adjectives such as “easy to use” or “intuitive” that can be attached to it with a straight face. There is simply no way to rebind your keys, not even by editing any configuration files manually, meaning that if you aren't used to using WSAD to move and R to reload you had better begin to take a liking to it to remain entertained. Other issues plague the gameplay itself such as a netcode that always seems to lag a bit even under steady connections and vehicle aiming crosshairs that are far and away detached from where you are actually aiming most of the time.

The vehicles themselves handle more like bars of soap on a wet floor than the heavy tanks and BMPs that they are supposed to represent. Sound effects in War Rock seem to be randomly selected from a sound bank rather than actually be used in context; such as when you'll hear ricochet sounds that seem like bullets are twanging right by your head from distant battles between entirely different sets of people instead of anywhere near your location. While the community for any game can occasionally be immature or juvenile in War Rock the community is largely so and one can comfortably wager a bet and sleep well at night to have someone find a server lobby that isn't largely composed of elitist and impatient players that nearly automatically kick lower ranked players from their team so that a higher rank (and potentially better equipped) player can take their place.

It's not that War Rock doesn't have a good idea for gameplay direction, as the persistent ranking and economy is an idea that the genre has yet to fully explore. At the same time this direction has no momentum behind it and sometimes seems haphazard at best in its implementation. The fact that you pretty much are forced to spend $15 a month to remain competitive is a glaringly large detriment to itself when you can look at other titles that have the same amount of content and much more polish and enjoyment for a one-time fee of $50 or less. Ultimately, War Rock can be boiled down into the nutshell that out of its three gameplay modes only the Close Quarters Combat is really worth a second look and even it is marred by lackluster netcode, a community that has a maturity ratio of about 1 in 5, and the prospect that once your starting dinar is gone you face either using inferior weaponry and being constantly out gunned or spending an additional $15 a month. The bottom line issue is whether or not War Rock is worth that $15 a month, and sadly most gamers are probably better off paying a larger one-time fee for some of the bigger and better titles in the genre than to pay per month for what is a largely inferior title in nearly every aspect that can be quantified.