Auto Assault Preview

The last couple of days have borne witness the kind of wanton destruction on post-apocalyptic roads unseen since Mel Gibson went off on one after his family had been slaughtered by a buttock-baring biker and his gang. Yes, trawl out all those Mad Max references, because NCsoft’s Auto Assault is back. Over the weekend 4000 lucky competition winners joined members of the gaming press and pre-order customers for a veritable orgy of automotive anarchy, in a 48-hour beta-testing marathon.

A Weekend in the Wastelands (as the beta-test was called) might not sound like the most enticing destination to spend your free time in, but the general atmosphere on the appropriately named ‘Apocalypse’ server was cheerful and excited. The weekend didn’t start out too promisingly, with plenty of people reporting difficulty logging in on Friday night and Saturday, leading NCsoft to extend the beta until midnight on Monday. It was a well-received move by the playing public, and as the clock ticked over towards the server shutdown time, several players were lamenting that they didn’t have longer to play.

From quite early on, it was obvious that the game is still in the fairly early beta stages. Running the game at high settings, with high quality sounds, environmental and advanced shaders was a recipe for instability and performance issues, with glitches and crashes aplenty, almost regardless of specification, though people with Creative soundcards seemed to suffer more than most. Toning down the graphical and aural bells and whistles, however, resulted in everything being far more fluid and stable, allowing us to sample the game in full flow.

Setting aside the technical issues, of which there are plenty and which will probably take another couple of months of solid testing to iron out, Auto Assault oozes potential. It appears that three is the new two, as far as MMORPGs are concerned this year, because like Codemasters’ RF Online, Auto Assault features three competing factions, rather than the traditional two. This promises to make PvP combat much more interesting in contested zones. Will the Mutants and Biomeks choose to victimise Humans over each other, or will it the players of the three factions simply duke it out in a free-for-all? Unfortunately, we didn’t see any PvP on show at the weekend, since couldn’t gain a high enough character level to access the contested maps; but it’s going to be fascinating to find out in the retail release.

Auto Assault clearly draws influences from some of the best references videogaming has to offer: elements from Fallout, Grand Theft Auto and World of Warcraft are all there, along with the obvious Mad Max ‘Road Warrior’ ethic. The post-apocalyptic setting is suitably run-down and barren, but what’s most pleasing is the sheer scale of the maps. That shouldn’t be too surprising, given that you spend most time in your car (though within towns you do travel around on foot), but the first time you go leaping off the side of the quarry at Malachite Mines and you’re presented with a vast hole in the ground with a volume of approximately a cubic mile, you can’t help but have your breath taken away. This scale does have a price, however. Auto Assault isn’t the best looking game in the world. Environmental textures are quite flat, the colour and trim pattern options for the vehicles are fairly limited (it would be nice to see some glossier or pearlescent paints, for example), but there is still plenty of scope to personalise your vehicle.

‘Trick’ parts can be looted from kills, allowing you to fit anything from spiky car treads to blood-stained pipes to customisable hard-points at your local car Body Shop (for a small fee, of course). The weapons are also fully modelled and are visible on your vehicle. Your ride has three weapon hard-points, fixed mountings for front and rear-facing weapons, plus a rotating turret on the roof, which can be swivelled using your mouse. Each weapon has an effective arc and range within which it can hit targets and rarer weapons can even target more than one enemy simultaneously. The turret can track enemies when you click on them, should you want to concentrate on a particular opponent, or you can leave the turret in free-target mode, which allows you to rotate the turret as you see fit, completely independently of the driving controls.

Combat, though still statistically-based (each weapon has a Damage Per Second rating), genuinely feels real-time, no doubt aided by the fact that you have to specifically trigger your weapons to fire, rather than simply click an ‘attack’ flag and let the stats sort it all out. If the graphics feel weak when you look at the game environment, when you get into battle, you can see where the effort went. The special effects for weapons and attack powers are very eye-catching and give you a real sense of involvement. Charging into a Pike settlement and literally running rings around infantrymen (or running them over), whilst spraying them with radioactive goo from your roof turret and making them explode in a shower of gore will warm the heart of even the coldest sociopath; it’s fast, chaotic, enthralling and spectacular stuff. If anything, it should really put the ‘grin’ back into ‘grinding’, because I challenge anyone to be bored by tearing around the landscape in a nuclear-powered car, blasting people to kingdom come with mini-guns and plasma cannons.

The handling model of the cars is right out of the school of Grand Theft Auto. Whilst physics have been used to help model the traction, weight and momentum of the vehicles, NCsoft hasn’t over-egged the science bit, meaning the larger vehicles used by the Engineer-type classes aren’t totally unwieldy. The handling still isn’t perfect, however: I ran into a strange bug where equipping your vehicle with snow tyres made your car completely uncontrollable in anything other than a straight line. Attempting to turn the car even a little threw it into a hand-brake turn-style spin, especially on snow, where the tyres were supposed to grip the most! At least this kind of thing should be easily fixed before release.

So, whilst the developers still have quite a bit of work to do with some of the more technical aspects of the game, all the basics of a life-eating MMORPG appear to be in residence already. With three-way PvP, a truly grand scale, accessible and involving combat, plus a setting that will appeal to people turned off by Tolkien-esque Orcs ‘n’ Elves fantasy, Auto Assault has the potential to vie for the title ‘RPG of the Year’ and to be a genuine alternative for those people who’ve got a little tired of World of Warcraft. We can’t wait to see the final version.

To register for the European beta head over to the official Auto Assault website.