Reviewed by: Radchek
Developer: Net Devil
Publisher: NCSoft

Sometime in the near future: Alien entitles hover above the Earth, fire a strange radioactive substance onto the surface and then disappear. Soon after, some of the world’s population begin to develop strange mutant powers. Society responds by creating cyborgs (called Biomeks) to track down and destroy any mutants. After years of fighting, the humans become impatient and pack up shop several thousand feet underground (without the Biomeks). They then nuke the planet .. as you do!

A few hundred years later, the humans return to the surface to discover the Mutants and Biomeks have survived (although they aren’t on friendly terms). The world is now a desolate place filled with wrecked buildings, strange creatures and mutated humans. The only safe way to travel is in armoured ground vehicles that are armed to the teeth with weapons.

The aim of the game is to try and make a name for yourself in the wasteland by completing missions for your race, crafting funky auto-parts and killing anything you come across in the wasteland.

My first piece of advice is to clear your mind of any expectations you might have for Auto Assault. I was expecting GTA style game play with a post-apocalyptic Mad Max game world; all topped off with a similar storyline to the classic Fallout series. Forget that.

It’s more of a fast paced third-person-view shoot-em up, like an update of the classic ‘Roadblasters’ and ‘Carmageddon’. If you’re too young to remember those (Have we really been gaming THAT long - Alf), think of ‘Rollcage’. The majority of the game is spent in your vehicle; you can’t get out until you drive to a city, which is the equivalent of an Everquest 2 workshop.

You start off by picking a race and each race has mastered a particular technology; Mutants use radioactive contamination, humans use energy and biomeks use corrosives & fire. You then decide on a class for your character. Each race has different names for these classes but they boil down to variations of the warrior, priest, wizard and rogue types we see in most fantasy games.

All characters have four stats: Combat (i.e. strength), Tech (i.e. intelligence), Theory (i.e. wisdom) and Perception (i.e. agility). Which stats are more important depend on your class. (i.e. same old same old :) - Alf)

I tried a few classes but ended up settling with the Commando as its hefty defence seemed to make it the easiest class to complete missions. Each class has a particular vehicle and a particular set of character models/accessories to choose from. After that, it’s ready to play.

The vehicle handling is more radio-control car rather than driving simulator. The physics are pretty basic; driving of a cliff edge and landing a thousand-feet below won’t result in any damage. On the off-chance that you land upside down or get stuck, you can press a button that will magically make the car jump and land on its wheels.

There are three main weapon points on each vehicle. The front and back are fixed points that will hit anything in range of a fixed 60-degree arc in front or behind of the vehicle. The roof turret also has a 60-degree arc but this can be moved 360-degrees around the vehicle. It will follow your mouse cursor wherever it is on the screen. Rather than choosing a target and the weapons auto-firing, it’s completely manual (bash the mouse button). Melee weapons can also be attached to vehicles to increase impact damage.

The landscape is filled with hills and jumps, interspaced with post-apocalyptic road & building leftovers. Graphically it's okay (reminded me of the ‘City of Heroes’ landscape) but nothing ground-breaking. There’s a fair bit of destructible scenery such as road signs, fences and abandoned shacks. Destroying these may result in raw materials dropping, which can be used for crafting. There are various towns (called stations) where you can sell items, talk to NPC’s for missions and repair your car.

Enemies include mutated wildlife, other vehicles and radioactive chavs (called Scavs, honest). They’ve all got one thing in common - they never stand still. Even during combat, enemies will frantically move around to avoid getting hit. There are also elite enemies that normally require a few people or lots of repair kits to survive. Graphically, enemies look pretty average and don’t have a wide range of animation. I found the combat with mobs very unsatisfying and there’s never any real sense of contact in a fire fight. Most of the time, I only knew I was hitting an enemy because their health was going down. Enemy sound effects consist of screams or gunfire, both of which are pretty pathetic!

Dead mobs may drop usable car parts or one-shot consumables, the former can be mounted or used for crafting. Consumables include burgers, which increase skills for a limited time and repair kits, which restore hit points. Trims and spoilers also drop and can be added to your vehicle, but since you’re gonna be staring at the bumper for 90% of the game, they’re a bit pointless.

As with most MMORPG’s, you get XP for completing missions and killing mobs. Going up a level gives you three sets of points to spend on your character stats, crafting skills and talents. Talents range from passive effects that give you better hit accuracy, better defence, cloaking, etc to offensive measures like zapping enemies with a psionic burst, reducing enemy resistances, etc. Offensive skills appear as buttons on a toolbar at the bottom of the screen and can be activated by pressing the relevant key. Much like combat, the effect of offensive skills is a simple animation that results in an energy/explosive/acid burst flying in the general direction of the enemy. Once again there’s no real sense of hitting the enemy.

In keeping with the arcade-style of gaming, your vehicle doesn’t require fuel and your weapons don’t require ammo. The only things you have to worry about are your shields, hit points and power (which drains when you use talents). There are no penalties for dying; when your vehicle is destroyed, you are airlifted to the nearest repair station and a few hit points are returned to you (this all takes just a few seconds after dying). Driving onto a repair pad at a station will restore 5% of your hit points every few seconds (for free) and then you’re ready to go again.

The NPC’s are pedestrians (can’t run ‘em over unfortunately). Driving close and pressing the talk key will result in mission text box appearing. There’s no animation or voice over for this action - your character doesn’t even stick his head out of the window. The mission text is pretty bland not to mention bloody tiny, and the goal is normally to kill x amount of something or drive through a series of checkpoints.

The best bit of the game is crafting, which requires entering a city, which are basically workshops but you can pick up a few missions in them too. You get to see your character walking about but they are so poorly animated it looks like they desperately need visit the loo and soon!!

Crafting involves playing about with armour, weapons & engines. You can learn how to build items from raw materials, increase the stats of existing items and add power-ups slots them. As some of the results are random, it’s possible to create a unique item that no one else in the game will have. It works rather well once you know what you’re doing but it’s a steep learning curve. The in-game training/description for crafting was rubbish; I had to use an online game guide to get to grips with it.

There is however a major flaw in crafting – you need to gather loads of a specific raw material for whatever it is you’re trying to do. You can refine items dropped from mobs or drive around destroying scenery in the hope that the required raw materials will drop from them. The net effect is that it very quickly becomes a tedious grind.

I had trouble with the community at first, rarely received any replies on comms but this is slowly getting better. I guess a fairly small player base is to be expected on a new game. The comms system isn’t the most accessible in the world and if I hadn’t had experience of other MMORPG’s chat systems and commands, I would have been very confused. There was rarely any lag but I think this is due to the small amount of players on the server.

There are good points – it’s different from most MMORPG’s and it has a fast ‘n’ frantic arcade style of play. It also has a crafting system you can really get your teeth in to. On the flip side, crafting is let down by the grind of it all. The graphics and sound are average and nothing you wouldn’t have expected to see two years ago. The music was a non-stop rock-attack-riff; fun for five minutes but it quickly became monotonous. This leaves you with the sound effects, which consist of standard weapon fire and the dull rev of the engine.

The mission objectives don’t vary and the mission texts have no real flavour to them. Skills and talents are all pretty bland. Combat isn’t very satisfying and grinding for spare parts very quickly becomes your only objective between missions.

With the exception of crafting, the game doesn’t have any depth and certainly doesn’t justify a monthly fee. This becomes apparent after playing for a just couple of days; I can’t imagine playing it consistently after a few weeks. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the players quit when their free month ends.

Auto Assault is an average arcade car shoot-‘em up that has had the MMORPG elements stuck on as an afterthought. These elements contain nothing we haven’t seen in previous MMORPG’s and they’ve been done better in quite a few of them.

Buy 'Auto Assault' from GAME and help support the Alfies!

Minimum Spec	Reviewed on
1.6 Ghz processor 512Mb RAM 8Gb Hard Disk Space NVidia GeForce4 TI 64Mb series or ATI Radeon 8500 w/64Mb	AMD 64 3500+ 1Gb RAM Nvidia GeForce 6800 (256Mb) 240Gb HD