Auto Assault

By: CAPTAIN GORDON EDWARD
Review Date: Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Auto Assault is NCSoft's answer to the MMORPG world for those whom have wanted a Mad Max experience. In a world where the gross populous has died out, life continues. This mass slaughter was ordered by its own people in an attempt to preserve the core essence of humanity. The main reason was because of diversity, and fear of it, after a rogue mutant gene began to display itself. It is now hundreds of years in the future. In essence the world has become a garbage dump, and you are going to take out the remaining trash.

The core of the game is all about driving your vehicle around, and kicking ass. In the beginning you are supplied with your very own low-end vehicle, but it provides ample power for where you are. As you battle along you will gain levels for your character, and your vehicle. This will of course help you become more powerful. During your travels of destroying enemies, or visiting shops, you will find material to upgrade your vehicle. Things that you can upgrade are your weapons, like your front, top, back areas, tires, and a few other things. Your front gun will only be able to shoot forward, likewise with the back gun, but your top one will be able to fire in all directions.

In the beginning you get to choose your character types between the human, mutant, and the Biomeks. You also get to choose your sub classes, which affect the gross abilities of your character. For the humans, you can be a commando, an engineer, a lieutenant, or a bounty hunter. The other races have similar classes, which does diversify the game. You also have a lot of different character slots, so a new experience is only a character creation away. Depending on the type of character you choose as well, your vehicle will be different, but you will have the ability to colour customize it when you are creating the character. The main differences between the character types are that humans have shields for their vehicles, mutants regenerate, and cyborgs have extra hp. In a way this is a bit like Star Craft.


What I like is simple, besides the source material, and that these weapons vary quite a bit. Each of them has their own unique affects, where one may be spewing bullets, spitting out radioactive material, or shooting out flames. Probably my favourite one would involve shooting rockets around you at your enemies. Each of these will all do different types of damage to other vehicles around you. Each of them looks and sounds great, adding to the ambiance of the world. Further adding to their unique qualities is each of them also has different range of damage, and reloading rate. If you are having troubles with your weapons though, you can always just take your vehicle and slam it into the targets that you are attacking.

The main ways of getting experience is either by completing missions, where you generally will get a bonus of either money, or upgrades to your vehicle. The other way of getting experience is killing NPC's, which is much like what you would do with any other game. Gaining the levels will add to several different skill pools, some which help with your combative power, and others with the technical aspect of upgrading your vehicle. You will additionally get combat skills that will increase your defence, or damage dealt for a limited time.

There is also a crafting system for parts to help you upgrade. Often to get the recipe of the parts you will need to reverse engineer other parts. Sometimes when you reverse engineer parts, you do not have the required skill level to put the item back together again. Also if you use recipes too many times, you will oddly eventually lose it. I do not know why they included this, since using a recipe multiple times should actually improve it in my opinion.

It would be unfair to continue any further without mentioning the completely destructible world outside of towns. If you see things like trees, you can shoot them down, or run them over. The same thing can be said for the many buildings, shanties, and even just random crates. This kept me entertain for quite a few hours, just running into things, and trying to find out how quickly I can make them explode. Sometimes when you destroy something, the rubble remains for you to play with. This can cause issues where you are trying to drive over it, but even then it is just great to see. What I did not like though is that the landscape often was not covered with things to destroy.

The graphics system is built off of the Havok engine, which powers another game under NCSoft's wing, City of Heroes. Many other games like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Age of Empires 3, Perfect Dark Zero, and a new game called Saints Row are also powered by it. Overall the Havok engine does quite a good job with the vehicles mechanics, with how it flies through the air over hills. I did have several issues overall with the game, even when changing up display settings, or lowering the resolution. The problem was that the game ending up being a tad choppy, or the game would freeze and crash the computer. I played the game on two different computers, and one of them had a major issue with the game where it would not load beyond the installation page after downloading the patch. On the other computer, the game had issues where it would crash somewhat frequently, roughly once an hour.

I do commend the loading screens though, as they did keep me amused when loading up the game... in between it resetting my computer. They have humorous banter in the loading bar, with messages of "Punching kittens" and "Loading loaders". At first I was wondering if I had read it correctly, and it turns out that I did. It does take the edge off, and I think that having this in the game was a fantastic idea.

In the end, the game is decent, but nothing great. It almost feels like the game should be free to play online, much like the Guild Wars game from NCSoft. They are making constant upgrades though, which includes evolving the stability of the game. I know the game would be better if it stopped crashing my computers, but I hardly have to tell you that. Hopefully their next patch deals heavily with the stability of the game. Who knows, maybe it was just the computers that I was playing the game on that are at fault. I love how many quests there are, and how often you will be tuning up your vehicle. I wish that the quests varied more so than just go here and kill this or that. I love the game itself, but with its stability issues are what are heavily affecting my score. All and all, Captain Gordon gives this game a B-.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? CaptainGordonEdward@Gmail.com