Auto Assault Preview
Muun, 2005-10-10

There you are, stuck in early morning traffic. Your nerves are doing a nervous tightrope dance as you assess the damage another late day to work will cause. Tap, tap on the steering wheel as the bastard sweat of frustration breaks on your brow. It's not so much frustration as a feeling of sheer helplessness of the situation. Your job hangs on the line and all you can do is sit here, tap your steering while, switch radio stations and swear. And then, just as you start contemplating doing a Michael Douglas dump-the-car-behind-and-smack-some-buttmunches act, that good old guardian angel called imagination kicks in to calm the situation. And you know exactly what would really make your day: Guns. Big turret mounted gattling guns atop a spiky bull barred metal monster blazing a path to freedom up Broadway Street…

Auto Assault aims to appease the frustrated driver's penchant for blowing shit up on roads. The selling point is stated unequivocally in its main catchphrase: "The Fastest, Most Destructive MMO Ever!" And as far as this declaration is concerned, Auto Assault delivers 100%. You play a member of one of three factions (Human, Biomek, Mutant) warring over a stretch of junk-strewn post-apocalyptic America. The game plays like a watered down version of Interstate '76 cross-pollinated with your general stock MMORPG format: Go out, get one of x hundred generic missions, blow stuff up, rack up XP to improve your character's level and skills, while picking up items that can be used to craft or trade for improvements to your vehicle or training for your character. For the majority of the game, your vehicle represents you. When entering cities, you jog around using your humanoid avatar, which isn't used apart from shopping, getting missions and hanging out chatting to other post-apocalyptic folk about… well… post-apocalyptic stuff. Like trading bits of scrap metal, grease to be converted into accoutrements used to pimp up your ride and show the other wasteland- blazing hunks of metal on wheels, who's the snazziest Mad Max wannabe of the realm.

The crafting system for Auto Assault looks quite promising, giving players a chance to reverse engineer anything they pick up and combine the bits and pieces on their destructofest in a wide variety of ways. There is a limit to the number of crafting skills you can learn at any one time and these vary from specialising in repairing and constructing engines, weapons, devices and the like.

Most, if not all the missions at all levels can be soloed. One can if he so wishes team up with others in groups called convoys and blast the land together, but with the speed and random possibilities of movement it can get quite messy. In other MMOGs, it's fairly easy to stay in groups as you're not doing 80MPH executing handbreak turns and shooting at a multitude of things buzzing around your screen. This is especially tricky since mobs move around at considerable speeds and seem to go in rather random routes, meaning that to hit the damn things you have to chase after them and go in similarly chaotic ways, making it quite disorientating at times. The landscape doesn't have much in the way of landmarks that might help one find his bearings. It's all pretty much a non-descript big open space with a few buildings here and there and piles of junk and mutated vegetation spotting the landscape. As you might imagine, the landscape isn't exactly inspiring. You don't get the feeling of being in a rich world with distinct regions as you do in, say, World of Warcraft.

The combat and missions are straight forward. You get a mission, an arrow points you in the direction of your target and once you find your target you make sure you keep your right mouse button pressed while keeping your target in the firing arc by manouvering with the W, A, S, D keys. When the guns start generating too much heat you let go of the right mouse button. As soon as the heat dissipates (and it does so rapidly) you press it again and send more stuff flying in the air. Often the screen is cluttered with mobs ranging from scuttling mutated giant insects, green-goo-spitting angry sunflowers, suicidal maniac humanoids that rush headlong at you in a vague attempt at scratching your newly acquired spray-job and, of course, other vehicles that in the few days of play testing I had consisted of blue VW beetles with a turrent mounted gun or garbage trucks armed with missile launchers plus a couple of bikes sprinkled here and there for effect. Those expecting something along the lines of an MMOG version of Carmaggeddon with guns or Interstate '76 will be disappointed. The driving physics are more akin to the old Amiga god-view racing and car combat games and the lack of 1st person perspective (at least in its current incarnation) as well as lack of repercussions for driving into things will make it hard for driving enthusiasts to get into.

I played a Biomek terminator (the Biomek "tank" class) and died only once in the first ten levels as there are outposts of your faction dotted all over the landscape and you simply visit a repair station here which fixes you free of charge. Even for enemies 2 or 3 levels higher than me in areas crawling with anti-me critters, the damage done to my little gun toting garbage truck accumulated quite slowly. So if you want to stay alive you simply avoid letting your shields drop down too low before going full speed back to an outpost. When you do die, you get air-lifted by an independent company of dudes that… airlift broken cars back to their respective faction's closest outpost for a quick repair and off you go again.

As you progress through the levels you get 2 points per level to spend on one of four attributes: Combat, Tech, Theory and Perception. You also get 1 point to spend on one of Faction and Class Skills. Each faction has a choice of four classes ranging from a blowing up person, building techie type, sneaky infiltrator and the so called "master-mind" class (yes, even YOU get a chance to play the role of the leading world power's prime minister!!). You also get to customize your avatar for those lazy city shopping spree sessions or when you're entertaining friends (or that special mutant lady) in your humble pad. I personally went for the angry marine look, complete with canon arm. The canon arm wasn't too useful an investment as it is merely a cosmetic prosthetic, which can create considerable embarrassment when attempting to open a wine bottle for that afore-mentioned mutant lady friend.

Overall the game delivers what it promises: long hours of blowing-up-crap bliss. The question is what sort of gamer will it appeal to? Will the action-craving gamer pay a monthly fee for what feels like a late nineties post-apocalyptic arcade with character advancement, crafting and multiplayer options thrown in? Will the MMORPG player identify enough with a little vehicle zooming around the screen as his character to want to put time, money and effort into developing the vehicle slash quasi-character? Will those good old Car Wars fans find what they are looking for in this aspiring MMOG version of the golden oldie? I doubt that all those sceptical of an integration of MMORPG with a fast paced action car warring post apocalyptic game will have their scepticism dispelled by Auto Assault. On the fun, blowing-things-up side of things the game works well enough, but on a lot of other fronts - at least in its current Beta stage - the overall concept and what the game does with it are both problematic. It simply seems difficult for the game to succeed on all the fronts it wishes to succeed, both because of the overall conceptual structure of the game and the way the various elements of that structure have been married. But I will definitely give the release version a spin to see if these doubts have been eased by the final product.

• Auto Assault
• NetDevil
• NCsoft