Auto Assault

Overall score:

Auto Assault is, if nothing else, a sign that the Massive Multiplayer Roleplaying genre is expanding beyond its sword and sorcery roots. We’ve seen superheroes, and the occasional sci-fi, but with Auto Assault we see a direct homage to Mad Max—a post-apocalyptic world in which you drive a fast, armored car and fire shotguns at punks. The car idea may sound a little odd, but at its roots it’s really just a different graphic for the same, albeit far faster, game character you’ve played anywhere else. The game as a whole is underwhelming, but surprisingly fun and worth a look for any MMORPG fan who loves the post-apocalypse genre.

The world of Auto Assault is split into three factions: Humans, Mutants, and Biomeks, each of which has its own sci-fi spin on the same four classes: a warrior, a healer, a buffer, and a rogue. There’s a pretty cool, Fallout-esque storyline behind each faction and where they come from, and why they can do what they can do, but I personally I found this story to actually get in the way of what I wanted to do. You can’t actually make a Mad Max character—a human scavenger—because the humans are highly advanced in technology and the scavengers are green and mutated. This might be unfair of me, because I have very specific ideals for a post-apocalypse setting: I want people to live by the skin of their teeth in jury-rigged shanties, not hang out in a massive technological metropolis. The thing is, once you get into the game you leave most of these cities behind and spend your time zooming around in a car, so you can ignore it if it means that much to you.

The zooming, however, is awesome. Despite fighting and killing and looting just like pretty much every other MMORPG character out there, your character in Auto Assault handles like a souped-up speedster in a racing game, and you can do everything—race, jump, spin out, and so on. With the right car and the right upgrades you can hit some pretty amazing speeds, which can actually be more entertaining than the game itself; you won’t want to stop and fight the little mutant bugs because you’re having too much fun zooming around the giant maps. I would have appreciated a stronger focus on running battles, where you actually fight at top speed while racing down the highway, and to be fair there is an element of that—I got into several large-scale battles where I was constantly running to get away from bad guys. The difference is that the bad guys were often on foot, rather than driving cars of their own, and I was mostly racing around in circles. It’s still fun, don’t get me wrong, but not the high-speed battle I was hoping for.

The other major innovations in the game are actually even cooler than the speed: the game includes collision damage, realistic physics, and a fully destructible environment. You can run over people, crash into walls, and knock down buildings. You can slam into a stack of barrels and watch them go tumbling down a hill. Even your bullets have kinetic force, instead of just mathematical damage, and you can knock things over or out of the way simply by shooting them. This is easily the most dynamic environment in any MMORPG, and that actually translates into how you play the game—if some armed thugs are shooting at you from a balcony, you can actually bring down the balcony and then attack them in person. If you run over a scavenger hut and destroy it, chances are some scavengers will crawl out of the wreckage and attack you. It adds a lot of depth, realism, and ambience to the game.

Auto Assault also features a fully-fledged crafting system, as you would expect from a game that revolves so heavily around technology. Characters can find items, salvage parts, and put together all kinds of useful, quirky, or cosmetic enhancements to their cars. Even in the early levels I was able to start modifying my weapons, and was incredibly pleased with myself the first time I grafted a couple of trinkets onto a machine gun to improve its performance. The crafting system is especially nice in the way it scales with your level—rather than force you to train craft skills separately, the game simply gives you a craft skill boost with each level and lets you apply it anywhere you want, much like their regular skill points. The result is a smooth crafting system that gives you the feel of tinkering with your car without pulling you away from combat and exploration.

Despite everything the game has going for it, and no matter how much fun I had racing around and blowing stuff up, I never found myself really getting into it on a deep, long-term level. I suspect that part of this is the cars—they don’t have the uniqueness or the personality that you typically get from a game character, and that lack of personal connection rubs off on all areas of the game. The towns you run across in the wilderness are pretty much just formless constructs, with no discernable purpose, and the scale of the cars makes the people standing around in them seem tiny and insignificant. Ironically, the bad guy towns you find and fight in are much more developed and realized than the ones where you refit and shop. In many towns they skipped the middle man entirely and hand out quests from talking computers—so a machine is asking a machine to go out and kill machines. The lack of the human element is glaring and problematic, and while it didn’t necessarily turn me off to the game, it prevented the rest of the game elements from turning me on.

Auto Assault is well-made and lots of fun, with a lot of new features that you’ve never seen before in the MMO genre. I felt that it lacked the staying power needed for a truly successful MMORPG but, if I may be permitted a pun, mileage may vary. If you already love racing games, and/or you’re looking for a lot of fast-paced combat, Auto Assault has it in spades.

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Written by Fellfrosch on July 17th, 2006