Through it, I got into other role-playing games such as GDW's World War III game Twilight: 2000, another Steve Jackson Game, GURPS, Iron Crown Enterprise's CyberSpace and so on and so forth. In high school and college my video game addiction grew by leaps and bounds, as did my addiction to role-playing games, board games, and even the occasional miniatures (BattleTech) and collectible card game (Illuminati: New World Order).Still, I harbored the love of cars with guns. It's an irresistibly American notion - coupling our national love affair with the car with the almost equally unanimous hatred of traffic put together with the almost Western-esque fascination with firearms. After all, why ram someone like a schmuck, or use some kind of crude, Mad Max crossbow, when Colt made all men equal?
Thus when I was at E3 last year, and saw Auto Assault, I was a happy, happy man. I watched a developer play, his car rampaging through the post-apocalyptic wastelands, mowing its way through crowds of pedestrians and blasting away at critters and other cars. "This," I thought, "is the MMO for me!"
Well, I finally got into the beta a month or two ago, and the game is now live. And how is it, you might ask?
Crazy stupid fun.
"Wha-wha-what?!" you ask, doing a bad Simpsons impression.
No, seriously. While labelled as an MMORPG - and having a lot of the trappings of the genre - in a way it's more like an MMO-first person shooter (MMOFPS). Let's do the basics first.
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Auto Assault is set in the future. Alien contamination had started to hit the Earth. This led to mutations. The mutants were oppressed and discriminated against. They started to fight back. Humanity found itself on the ropes. It created the Biomechanized Raiders to fight the mutants brutally and efficiently. This didn't seem to be working, either, so humanity, under the careful watch of the Hestia Corporation, quietly pulled its best and its brightest into underground arks, and then attempted to sterilize the Earth using nuclear fire, chemical gas, and biological stuff.When humanity returned to the surface, it found that it'd failed. The three factions fight for dominance - the mutants, thinking themselves the new era of mankind, the biomeks, still dedicated to wiping out the mutants but now also wishing to destroy the humans who betrayed them, and the humans, waging genocide to keep their bloodline - errr, genetics - pure.
(If you want to go on a strict morality basis, the mutants are the closest thing to good guys - in their shamanistic, "let's get everyone mutated or dead" kind of way. The biomeks want to convert everyone into either slaves or more biomeks (biomek propaganda is fun!). The humans want to wipe out everyone but themselves.)
So you pick a race. Then you pick a class. Each race has their own version of four basic classes. You have the tank class, which can soak up damage and dish it out (and often has buffs for allies). You have an agent class, which is the "rogue" of Auto Assault, stealthy and low hit points, but high in damage. You have the healing classes, such as constructors. And you have the commander classes, who command minions to help them. Throughout the beta, though I played all 3 sides at different times, I always played a tank (primarily a commando on the human side) and at release my guild (clan in Auto Assault) moved to the biomek side, where I made a terminator.After that you customize your driver - not that you'll see him much - and your starting car. Then it's off to the races!
You start off in an instance - an area where there's only you. Auto Assault uses instances to manage server populations - you might have multiple instances of a city, which they call layers, to keep it from getting overly crowded - and for certain zones, or maps. For example, in the human lands, the enemy known as the Corps has their Windjammer Base, which is a separate instance where their boss, General Nostos, is. If you go into there, you will be the only player in there, unless you go in as a convoy (i.e. a group).
Also, if you want to go PvP or player versus player in certain areas, you'll be taken to a PvP enabled layer. That means you won't run into people trying to harass you into PvP-ing if you don't want to, and if you do want to, everyone you see is a target. (Oh, and in PvP, you can't use items from your inventory - it's your car versus theirs.)
The controls are fairly straightforward. W is forward, S is backwards. A and D are the turns, and Q and E are "soft turns". You aim your turret with the mouse, though you can also lock onto a target using the Tab key, and the right mouse button (or the control key) fires all your weapons.
Weapons build up heat over time, so you need to be careful of that, though they don't require any ammo (some use power, though, which you also use for your special abilities). Some weapons do damage in a burst radius due to the power of explosions, while others may be able to spray multiple targets in its radius. Looking at the weapon will tell you these facts, along with an idea of how wide an arc it will fire in and what its range is.As you drive up to a truck stop, or drive into a town (the bigger ones are where you actually get out of the car and walk around) you'll see a "god light" on some of the NPCs. That'll tell you they have something for you - either a new mission to do, in exchange for clink (money) or gear, or that you turn in a mission to them that you've completed. Once you get a mission, it will usually give you a waypoint as to where to drive to, or what to kill. You drive around, doing missions, and unlike most MMORPGs you'll find that you're levelling as fast as you can get missions!
On a typical night I'd level at least once, at least through the lower level 20s (you can get up to level 80). Each level brings you skill points to use on special abilities, such as lightning blasts or armor hardening, as well as points to raise your attributes such as combat, tech, or perception. Some levels will also give you crafting points to raise your reverse engineering, tinkering, memorization, or experimentation scores.
Crafting is an interesting system. While you drive around the wastelands, killing everything you see and blowing up anything left standing (more on that later), you'll pick up things such as salvaged nuts and bolts or salvaged radioactive materials. You can refine these into better versions or combine them into new objects. When you find a "broken" piece of gear - either by buying it, getting it as a mission reward, or finding it on a dead body - you can repair it by using the materials. You can also buy kits to help raise your crafting score. Reverse engineering will let you break down working gear into non-working in order to learn how it works or experiment on it. Tinkering opens up gadget slots on gear, letting you add extra penetration to weapons or auto-repairing to armor. Memorization determines how many schematics you can memorize, thus requiring nothing more than pieces to build (rather than the "broken" version). And experimentation lets you add new stuff to basic weapons, making them better.The graphics are good in the game. There are some complaints about the size of the fonts, at least during the beta - I hadn't noticed an issue. But each race has it's own feel, as well as the world at large, and I really dig it. The world feels huge! And it's all what we call, "blow-up-able".
Thanks to the physics engine in the game (which does have its quirks; I get hung up all the time on small rocks) you can blow up almost anything you see. Ruined buildings? That's crafting materials, matey! Trees? BURNINATE! Radar installations? I need wiring for my lazorgun (pew pew pew!)!
The sound is pretty solid, too. The weapons sound cool, and the short music bit they play for each zone is enjoyable. Each race gets a narrated introduction to explain their background while the camera swoops across their opening zone.
And before I forget - there's no death penalty but time. If you die, INC - a neutral entity helping all 3 sides - will fly in, pick you up, and deliver you to a repair pad that repairs you for free. For a small fee, INC will also fly you to a different zone, and for a slightly larger fee, will fly in and repair you completely.
Is the game perfect? No. There are still bugs-a-plenty, including with NPCs and missions, but NetDevil is working hard on fixing them. The clan interface can still use some work, and NetDevil has already said they plan on adding in at least a mail system, and other tools to help player merchants sell their goods. There is housing in the game - which you get via a mission. The graphics in the "pedestrian" city are good, though the animations on the players is a bit stiff - but that's not the focus of the game. The missions, on the other hand, often have GREAT storylines and funny lines - it's great to read them a lot of the time. Some can be funny, others touching, while still others disturbing.In short, Auto Assault is great, guns blazing fun. If you're at all interested in sci-fi MMORPGs, or a game to play where you don't have to rely on a ton of farming, or risk losing everything where you die, you should definitely try it out. I've found it makes a great, relaxing change of pace from - and I almost hesitate to phrase it this way - more "serious" games.
It's just darn fun!
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