For a flightsim, War Thunder is awful. The control mechanics are keyboard and mouse, the game just does not work with a joystick - simply put you can put your pipper on target a lot quicker with a mouse, and if youre faffing about with a joystick you will die. Flying in your cockpit (when a joystick shines) is limited to sim battles and you wont get one of those until you level up a lot using arcade (3 lives) and realistic (1 life). If you try a JS in AB or RB youre basically either giving up fov or trying to get your head around flying third person. The arenas that you spawn in are stacked with the best planes in the tiers and your death is the entertainment for the tiered folks.
I was determined to get into this game, bought a 10 quid plane then just died for two days. The people who play are a nice bunch and pointed out that I was doing it wrong having not actually learned the planes so i dumped my expensive plane and went back to the beginning and levelled up properly for another couple of days. For what it is, its a fun game, kind of like CS for sims but with a much steeper learning curve, but in no way a flightsim. Things might be different once i level up a plane to get into sim battles.
Flight sims currently playing are DCS (hardcore but very satisfying with an oculus), IL2 CLOD (with the team fusion mod makes this a lot of fun), IL2 BOS (ok) and FSX is quite fun.