War Thunder 1.99 "Starfighters" now available with new planes, Japanese helicopters, Italian ships, and more

More than two months since the last major update, War Thunder has finally received a brand-new pack of goodies. Although "Starfighter" sounds great and also reveals that quite a few F-104 jets have been added to the game, this update also comes with a generous amount of content for the fans of Italian military hardware — to be more specific, its ships.

In addition to the Italian Fleet tech tree — which is only available to fully research for those who buy one of the two early access packs, priced at 19.99 and 39.99 USD/EUR — War Thunder 1.99 "Starfighters" includes over a dozen of new aircraft. In addition to the F-104 family, jet fans can finally enjoy flying the Mach 2-capable Mirage IIIC, as well as the subsonic yet extremely versatile F3H-2 Demon and Scimitar F.1.

The (only four) Japanese helicopters that have been added to the game are historically accurate, so they are nothing more than copy-pasted variants of some US machines with different names, cosmetic options, and weapon choices.

The fans of ground vehicles get quite a few interesting military machines with War Thunder 1.99, such as the American HSTV-L light tank, the Russian 9P157-2 Khrizantema tank destroyer based on a BMP-3 chassis that features a radar, thermal imaging, and the ability to simultaneously fire two ATGM's at different targets.

In addition to all the above, there are multiple tweaks and fixes, as usual. I can only hope that Gaijin managed to keep the number of new bugs as low as possible, because in the few minutes that I actually spent playing the game after this update, I noticed severe connectivity issues. Feel free to drop a comment if you bumped into the same issues — or not, of course.