Auto Assault (PC)

[  « Previous Page | 1 | 2  ]

Forming convoys can be fun, but the game structure doesn't really encourage it

Vehicles can be traded in for superior models as the levels pass by, with higher level cars giving you more inventory space when you're not in town, or being faster or more robust than earlier models. Even the cars may be tinkered with, providing you have a customisable chassis and a suitable upgrade, though this will prevent you from selling the car on to another player, once you've bought a more potent vehicle. In keeping with the post-apocalyptic scenario, there's a "make do and mend" theme in the game as well, allowing you to salvage scrap from the game environment, refine it, and use it to repair broken items looted from the game world or bought from junk vendors. Whilst this crafting element may be appropriate to the game setting and the MMORPG genre, it's unfortunately largely redundant and distracts from the real core strength of the game: i.e. chucking your car around the landscape with reckless abandon, blasting Scavs to bits.

Auto Assault's developers have made much of the implementation of the Havoc 2 physics engine into the game. Indeed, the physics did attract my attention, though perhaps not for the right reason. Newton's laws of motion and gravity don't seem to apply as I remember them from my A-level Physics classes. It's more like they've been given a makeover from Jerry Bruckheimer. I'm pretty sure that a two-tonne car travelling at 72 miles per hour shouldn't be stopped dead in its tracks if it hits a tent. Not unless said tent is made out of depleted uranium, anyway. Yet in Auto Assault, this happens. Not very often, but sometimes, and there are plenty of other occasions where the physics will get a bit flaky. You'll be pitched into spins if you so much as hit a pebble, but you can steam through metal fences with no problem at all... the inconsistency is baffling.

 Advertisement

It's this kind of frustration that's indicative of the general quality of the game. All the ingredients for a life-consuming MMORPG are there, but the implementation has gone a bit awry. It has the quest structure of World of Warcraft, coupled with the freeform roaming and Hollywood driving physics of Grand Theft Auto, but barring a couple of the Boss battles, there's practically no incentive to team up and form a convoy to quest. Nearly all of the missions can be done solo, and when you do form a convoy, you're likely to be stymied by the myriad of technical problems. In the space of thirty minutes, I've had convoys be disbanded more than once because people have crashed out of the game during region transitions or because the chat channel simply stopped working and we couldn't talk to each other anymore.

You can customise the look of your ride using 'trick' parts found in-game

The game simply isn't up to scratch technically, and an example of this is the TIE-Fighter style power management dial in the user interface. It has three settings: "Speed", which gives you a bonus 20% to your speed at the cost of reducing your defence and offence bonuses by 13% each (not exactly what I'd call a fair trade); "Defense", which offsets your speed and offence bonuses for a boost to your defence by the same amounts; and "Offense", which works just as you expect. So what do the buttons on the power management dial say? "Defense"-"Speed"-"Defense". Well, that's what it looks like, because with the font they're using, it's very hard to see the difference between an "O", a "D", and an "F" and an "E". The dial is in fact labelled correctly, but with just a little more thought over something as simple as a font choice, this wouldn't have confused me for over 40 levels of game play. Other little oversights and annoyances include the fact that the pedestrian avatar animation (for when you're in town) is absolutely risible and there are no character emotes - which in a post-WoW world is stupefying.

There are just too many little flaws to be able to give a wholehearted recommendation. Yes, the combat is fast, thrilling, spectacular even; the environments are large and you're free to roam them at will; but it's graphically underwhelming and lacks atmosphere thanks to a minimalist musical score and weak sounds effects. It may be treading different ground from traditional MMORPGs, but it doesn't have the technical panache of WoW or Guild Wars, nor the social focus. Worse, with the three competing factions, Auto Assault is perfectly suited to Player vs. Player gameplay, yet you won't even get close to a contested zone of the game until you're most of the way up the eighty-step level ladder. The game has so much potential, but you can't mark on what the developers may or may not do to the game as it evolves over the next year or two. Unfortunately, it's the early adopters who will pay the price; who will pay the monthly costs of developing the game into what it really should have been in the first place. As it is, Auto Assault is a distraction - a bit of massively multiplayer fluff - not the genuine competitor to World of Warcraft people hoped it would be.

Editor's Comment: A mistake was made regarding the power management dial that is found in the lower left corner of the screen. This is labelled correctly, and the review has been altered since publication to reflect this.

[  « Previous Page | 1 | 2  ]