The BUK-M3 in War Thunder is a complete waste of time for both players and the developers. On paper, it should be one of the most advanced SAM systems in the game, but in practice it is one of the most frustrating and least rewarding vehicles to use. The system is massive, slow, and radar-dependent, and yet it cannot reliably perform the one job it is supposed to do: shoot down aircraft.
Yes, the missiles are ARH-capable and technically can hit targets, but the reaction time window in-game is so small it is not realistic to expect players to use it successfully. With ping, radar lock delay, and terrain masking, the only time you will ever hit something is if it is flying at 1 km altitude or higher. Any aircraft flying at treetop level can just circle the battlefield, drop ordnance in third-person, and the M3 can do absolutely nothing about it. That makes the vehicle useless in the exact scenarios it was designed to counter.
To make matters worse, the radar screen becomes cluttered with ally and enemy missile returns. This makes it impossible to select or maintain a plane as a target before it drops off the radar again. This has been a gameplay issue since the first radars were added, but at least with early 1st or 2nd generation radars you could excuse it because they were primitive and poor tracking was expected. The BUK-M3 is supposed to be using a modern TWS system. The fact that it cannot sort out targets and instead drowns the operator in missile clutter only shows how broken and useless the implementation is in-game.
Then there is the so-called “anti-air” role itself. Spending an entire match shooting down a dozen ATGMs and never seeing a helicopter for more than one radar blip, or a plane for longer than a second, makes the entire point of fielding a big SAM system pointless. You invest time, spawn points, and effort into the role only to get clapped by a plane you could never realistically attack. The end result is you feel like nothing more than a giant, expensive target instead of a serious threat to air power.
The Pantsir suffers from similar issues, but at least it has guns as a backup. The Buk-M3 has nothing. It has no IR fallback, no optical guidance option, and no cannons. If your radar drops the track, which it will almost constantly, you are dead weight on the team. That makes it worse than any other top-tier SPAA and it feels like Gaijin only added it for the sake of content rather than giving players an actually functional vehicle.
From a gameplay perspective, it is boring and unrewarding. You sit there waiting for a lock, get maybe one or two seconds of target visibility, and by the time you press launch the target is gone. From a development perspective, it is a waste too, because all the effort spent modeling this vehicle has resulted in something almost nobody wants to play. If Gaijin is not going to fix the radar modeling or give the M3 a working TWS radar, then it would have been better not to add it at all.
The bottom line is simple: the Buk-M3 is shit. It is a hangar ornament that punishes players for picking it and adds nothing meaningful to the game. Unless it gets serious fixes to its radar performance or a functional TWS system, it will remain one of the worst-designed additions to top-tier ground.
