When it comes to massively multiplayer on-line games it’s safe to say we here at X-Play are a little tired of elves, dwarves, swords, and spells.  Luckily, NCsoft has been attempting to broaden the MMPOG genre with a few titles aren’t set in some generic fantasy realm.  Auto Assault is the latest attempt to get players to game outside the fantasy box.  It comes from Netdevil, the developer that created the vastly undermarketed and underappreciated Jumpgate.

Car Wars

The setting is a fresh departure from what we’ve come to expect in MMPOGs.  Auto Assault is a wet dream for the post-apocalyptic Mad Max fan.  Players are thrust into a twisted, mutated landscape where humankind it at a bit of a crossroads.  Three factions vie for survival, supremacy, and control in what’s left of a shattered world.

However, as the name suggests, you get to do all this in style.  Right from the start, players are outfitted with a vehicle in which to traverse the landscape and do battle with the numerous unfriendly critters that reside therein.  Players only exit their cars when visiting some of the larger settlements.

Get Your Kicks on Route 66

Combat is the ace of the proverbial sleeve for Auto Assault.  Encounters with enemies in the game are frequent and relatively quick.  Vehicles can be equipped with front and rear mounted weapons as well as a turreted one.  Scoring a hit against an enemy is measured by your ability to keep the bad guy in range and targeted within your weapon’s cone of fire.  It also relies on the stats of your character and weapon versus those of your enemy. In other words, it’s a mix of arcade action with the more conventional stat vs. stat found in virtually every other MMPOG.

In the case of Auto Assault, this generally works quite well. To be sure, there are frustrating moments when you’ll continually “miss” your target even through you’re firing away at point blank range.  But since the system does reward the driving skill of the player to some degree, there’s an incentive to keep your vehicle moving at all times.

Life on the Open Road

Even the act of just tooling around the landscape is made that much more interesting thanks to the fact that virtually everything in the environment can be smashed into or blown to smithereens. And the junk-littered landscape that makes up the core of your experience in Auto Assault is filled with stuff to shoot at.  Of course the game world does repopulate all of this stuff when you’re not looking so other players can get in on the fun.  But it does give the perception that this is a world that you as a player can interact with on a more intimate level than other games of this type.

The result is that basic navigation and battles are a bit more stimulating than your average MMPOG… at least at first.  You’re going to be engaging in a lot of combat.  Although the game does so much to make the battles more interesting, it doesn’t mitigate the fact that it gets really tedious after a while.  You’ll grow tired of the PvE environment long before you’re able to partake in the high level PvP areas.  It’s a nicer grind, I guess, but it’s still a grind.

Beyond Thunderdome

Currently, PvP appears to be a bit underdeveloped.  Lower level character can play around in combat arenas.  Our experience with this was less than satisfactory.  Due to low server populations or a lack of interest among players, jumping into the arena for some quick combat not really an option.  No one ever wanted to play.  Even just wandering around the PvE environments is downright lonely.  Chat channels are devoid of conversations and any promise of a booming player-driven economy is stifled by the lack of basic facilities like auction houses.  Even the quest structure does little to bring players together for some greater purpose.  It’s still a very static, unchanging world.

Magic Bus

The biggest disappointment with Auto Assault is that despite the genuinely interesting setting, almost all of the gameplay elements have been shoehorned into a generic MMPOG template.  You’re still just wandering around killing stuff in order to gain levels.  And even though your car is a neat extension of weapons and armor for your character, it’s really hard to swallow the “healing” skills and items you can use to instantly repair damage in the field.  In fact, a lot of the skills act just like magic spells might in a fantasy RPG.  And no amount of back-story or explanation will make this feel right.

Craft-werk

The crafting system is a different animal entirely.  It’s a sophisticated system that allows players to tweaking their items and actually experiment in order to get different results. Although it’s a little hard to get the hang of, there are a series of missions in the game that act as a tutorial.  And once you’ve figured it out, there’s a lot a flexibility to be found within it.
Looks like a sports car… Drives like a minivan

Auto Assault probably won’t set the world on fire, but the fresh setting and the proper amount of nurturing it will likely get from NCsoft should allow the game to carve out a respectable niche.  It’s a nice game.  Just don’t expect something radically different from what we’ve all be playing for the past 8 years or so.