And so the the roundup, after two weeks on the interstate system of a wrecked and ruined future. The Auto Assault trial can be found here:
Auto Assault.com: News - Look for the link near the top.
( EU players should try here instead: eu.autoassault.com/pcgamer)
Trial lasts 14 days, the client requires a ~3GB download, and the whole exercise requires no credit card details, but does need a PlayNC account setting up.
After an unexpected alien bombardment causes millions of deaths and thousands of mutations, and a failed attempt to restore order using a race of specially created biomechanical-enhanced shock troops, the remnants of genetically pure humanity, under the auspices of the Hestia Corporation, decide that the only course to a peaceful future, lies in the sterilisation of the entire world, with atomic fire. Upon returning to the surface they find that both the Mutants and the Biomeks have also survived the cleansing, and the world is now a different and more dangerous place.
Enter a new kind of warrior, to bring order, supremacy and peace - the road warrior. Using highly-modifiable nuclear-engined automobiles, these warriors leave their respective sanctuaries, and begin to impose their will on an increasingly ravaged and war-torn world.
You start life in the training area of your chosen faction, at the wheel of your first vehicle, fully equipped to hit the highway and start causing mayhem.
Three Good Things:
- Hectic
The basic business of moment-to-moment play in Auto Assault is tremendous fun, with the action being fast, furious, noisy and explosive, and yet it remains surprisingly intuitive, and requiring minimal 'real' driving game skills. Right from the word go, you feel powerful, gutsy and potent. It's quite rare these days that I'll actually go 'off mission' in these games, instead just putting in the minimum fighting necessary to tick off quests, which I tend to view as the real point of it all, and the fights just a means to an end. Not so in Auto Assault, and just going from A to B is a gleeful exercise in high-octane carnage. This will get old eventually, of course, but not nearly as soon as in other, more traditional types of MMO, I think. Killing ten 'rats' in Auto Assault, has yet to become a chore, and I'll often kill twenty, just for the sheer hell of it.
- Familiar
Beneath the cars, guns and post-apocalyptic setting, Auto Assault uses many conventions and mechanisms found in more usual MMOs - in particular World of Warcraft's mob con system, mission journal, loot types, auction house, mail, skills, pets, classes and more. Since the actual driving and fighting are new and different enough things to learn, this familiarity makes it fairly easy to get up to speed with the rest of the gameplay, despite the apparent surface culture shock of the post-apocalyptic setting. This also applies to deeper aspects of gameplay, such as progression through the world; the substance of missioning from outpost to outpost, and the whole thing feels much like the sub-60 WoW game, which isn't a bad thing if you liked that bit. This leads to some slightly silly or jarring elements, such as the 'Rusty AT Launcher of the Eagle' type of 'magic' loot names, but such lapses are forgivable in the interests of not totally confusing the hell out of new players from other games. This may not please those looking for an utterly different type of gaming experience, but on balance, I'd call this ease of adaptation a plus point.
- Setting
The world design I've seen so far, Biomek, Human and Mutant, and the wastelands around their cities, is very well done, and although not to everyone's taste, I like it, with obvious nods to the Fallout series, and the grim shattered desolation of a future gone wrong, but also many interesting and original touches, such as the Mutant tutorial area, the Tempernet assimilated areas and the various side-canyon 'dungeon' instances. A surprising level of backstory depth pervades the whole, for those interested in that sort of thing, and clearly a lot of thought has gone into that side of it all. It isn't a game that takes itself too seriously however, and as well as the sheer gleeful carnage of the basic gameplay, many of the missions and NPCs show a wry sense of humour that goes some way to lifting the mood of what otherwise might be a pretty grim type of gaming life. An added related bonus, is that unlike most MMOs with more than one faction or side, all three of Auto Assault's Factions seem to get entirely different zones to explore and play in, all the way up, only coming together in the end-game PvP zones, meaning that alting on a different side really does mean a different game, rather than just a different first 20 levels, greatly extending replay value.
Three Bad Things:
- Demanding
With so much stuff going off at once, so much destroyable detritus everywhere, such a high speed of travel, and the physics of bouncing about everywhere, the game is quite demanding on hardware. In particular, movement in the cities and outposts, where you are on foot, was almost impossible to control due to low FPS, unless I turned all the shadows off. Given Auto Assault's relative age, and my recently-new PC, I'd expect things to run a little more smoothly than it does. Occasional irritating memory leaks of some sort don't help either, and now and then, I'll need to shut it down and restart it, just to get the thing out of freezeframe slideshow mode - not helpful at these kinds of driving speeds. To be fair, these are few and far between, but one would expect them not to be there at all. Out on the road though, things move along at an acceptable pace most of the time, with the majority of the detail turned on. The game supports the addition of PhysX cards, presumably for even more impressive building explosions, but this seems a bit of an extravagance for what Auto Assault is, a bit of a jolly in gunned-up muscle cars. Going to need a fairly robust modern PC to get the most out if this one though. (I was using Vista throughout the trial.)
- Endgame
I'm mostly working on anecdote here, but general opinion is that there isn't a lot to do at the far end of Auto Assault, and activities seem to revolve around repeated solo/small group farming of the higher leveled instance bosses, or somewhat unbalanced Factional PvP in the middle bit of the world map, Ground Zero. Given that I got to Level 43 in fourteen days of reasonably measured evening and weekend gaming, I wouldn't think it unlikely that I'd cap out within a month or two. There's still doing it all again with the other two factions, as different classes, but even so, it's likely that the dedicated gamer will run out of Auto Assault reasonably quickly. This is hardly a problem unique to Auto Assault mind you, and MMOs of all types continue to struggle for a satisfying answer that annoying question we tend to ask when we finish the levels, 'What now?' In Auto Assault's case however, this Endgame Conundrum seems greatly exacerbated by the lack of population (below). No 40-man raiding schedule here, and I'd imagine it'll be a long time before we see an Auto Assault Expansion, if ever. Personally, I tend to just walk away from a game at this point, but for many gamers, life only begins after the levels are complete, and they'll have troubles with Auto Assault, by all counts.
- Quiet
The big one, and I've mulled this over more extensively in previous posts, but there's no getting away from the fact that Auto Assault is a ghost town, by any measurable MMO standard. It's a shame, certainly, but a grim reality, and it reaches into almost every aspect of the game. Pick Up Grouping, Auction House, Clans, Crafting Markets and Material Gathering, even just the low grade background hubbub that ordinarily you take for granted in most zones of most games. Other players can be found if you look hard enough, or hit the faction-wide chat channel, but very quickly you get used to going it alone, and the easily soloable nature of the bulk of the content reinforces the notion that you shouldn't really need help anyway, with even the instanced Boss fight side-canyon 'dungeon' areas being quite manageable alone. I'd agree that Numbers, as some abstract 'high score' of a game's popularity don't really matter, as long as you're personally having a good time in there, but there comes a certain lower threshold when the numbers start to have a very real impact on critical gameplay features. If indeed, a large part of the designed-in Endgame of Auto Assault is faction PvP warfare, it can't possibly be working as intended with that few participants. In general there seems to only be room for two types of player; the steadfastly independent soloist, content to do their own thing without ever needing anyone else around, or the unflaggingly extroverted socialite, driven enough to speak up early and often, and actively organise and participate on a factional level, and very little room in between for the more commonly adopted casual attitude to MMO gaming - the PUG, the Casual Sometimes-Grouper, and the Bank-Loitering Face In The Crowd. I tend toward the soloist, so am generally quite happy doing my own thing, but without many more players, it's unlikely to be a captivating enough society for most to want to stick with for the longer term.
All in all, I really liked it - the sheer novelty of the driving experience winning me over, compared to the more traditional sword-wielding pedestrianism of the usual MMORPG experience. I can see however, that Auto Assault is a quite short game - faster to progress that WoW even, and the price of it being so painless, grind-free and engaging, is that you're simply going to get through it all that much quicker, which is probably what's happened to make it the ghost town it is - most folks who were interested in it, have probably already won, and walked away content.
Anyway, I think I probably will be back to this one, as although getting over half-way through the Biomek lands and missions during the free trial alone, I do quite want to follow that to the end, and also see what the Mutant and Human zones and cars are like. Another two months of subscription ought to cover that, I think.
Final Verdict: Definitely worth a try. Worth buying too, but only if you don't mind soloing a lot. Satisfyingly different explosive fun, but possibly not for the longer haul.
So, time to park up the battlewagon, throw a dust-sheet over it and close the garage. I'm sure I'll be back on those broken roads soon enough, but it simply wouldn't do to go completely native after only the first free trial of the run. Next up is City of Heroes, so watch out Paragon City!