• Official Site: Auto Assault
• Developer: NetDevil
• Publisher: NCSoft

Vehical destruction has always had a home on the PC; from Destruction Derby, to Interstate 76, and the king of them all, Carmegeddon. Now NCSoft brings to you Auto Assault, where you play online against thousands of others vying for a spot of glory. Can a Massively Multiplayer Online Racing Game really work?

Auto Assault is a massively multiplayer online racing game in the post-apocalyptic future. You are placed in a harsh environment where you can blow just about everything up, and do it while driving 4 wheels of destruction. You can choose between three races; the humans, the mutants, and the biomeks. Each race has a four specialized roles you can play as, and they essentially translate to warrior, engineer, leader, and spy/assassin.

After going through training, it took a while to adjust to a different gameplay mechanic over your usual fantasy/sci-fi MMORPG. Since it is essentially a driving game, you’ll have to adapt your playstyle to suit this game. Once I got over the initial learning curve, I started having fun with the game, and enjoyed just driving around blasting anything that moves (much to the dismay of my fellow humans, I might add.) For a MMO, the developers made it pretty easy to figure out what to do in the game, you rarely feel lost as to what you’re supposed to do next.

One thing that threw me off was that underneath the racing exterior, is a role-playing game ruleset. I’ve noticed that a lot of my shots were missing this huge enemy boss that was deadset in front of me, and my aim was dead center of it. Yet I was missing it a ton, because somehow the game was factoring in my accuracy rating to the boss’s skill level. This happens with any other enemy you encounter, you’ll just end up missing them a lot, no matter how great your aim is. This, I feel, really detracts from the fun of the game.

Being that it is a racing game, control is a major factor in their enjoyment. A vehicle that feels right, and gives the sensation of speed will yield a fun racer. With Auto Assault, I found the control to be too tight and responsive, no matter what vehicle you drove. The larger vehicles didn’t give you a sense that they had some weight to them, and their center of gravity felt similar to the other, much lighter, vehicles. Cars handle like little remote controls, rather than real heavy objects that you can powerslide into a turn. Personally I’m not fond of this feel, but as I mentioned elsewhere, your mileage may vary.

Physics is also off the wall, making you car do twists and turns in the air like it was an acrobat. It just didn’t seem right. Most structures that aren’t important, are destructable, and you’re encouraged to plow through, blow up, ram, and essentially create havoc to uncover secret goodies. Shells of cars, buildings, lamp posts, trees, and a ton of other stuff can be destroyed, which can add some element of strategy to the battles.

I imagine this was all done to make the game more accessible, but if you’re a racing fan, you won’t find much in the way of control here. An example of an arcade racer that had superb control is FlatOut. Each car had its own handling characteristic, without going overboard making it a full-blown simulation. It just gave the right amount of feel to it to convey that sensation of controlling a beast of a car with a ton of horsepower under the hood. In Auto Assault, you get a cookie cutter car. As a result, playing each race feels the same, just with different environment and quests.

When you first start a character, the only thing that differentiates between each car, and each race, are the upgrades or powerups you can choose when you level up. These upgrades can range from extra armor, extra hitpoints, added firepower, added accuracy, to full blown weapons that obliterate anything you target. Levelling up is exciting because you can find new powers to use, make them even more powerful, and so on.

The graphics are pretty nice, nothing spectacular, but still nice. I was able to run at maximum quality at a widescreen resolution and it ran smooth most of the time. Sound explosions are real nice, and will have you swinging your view around to catch what exploded when you’re not involved with any firefights. Watching others fight is particular fun, especially if they’re using a weapon you haven’t tried before. Special effects all around is pretty good in Auto Assault.

There’s some crafting involved, and while it’s confusing at first, once you get the hang of it, you’ll end up putting together car parts and consumables that will help you a lot. Enemies you defeat on the battlefield may occasional drop spare parts or debris that you can pick up, and later fix into something useful that you can either use, or sell.

Dying, or wrecking your car, has no penalty other than the time it took you to get where you ended up dying. And if you do get dented up pretty bad, there are plenty of repair stations lying all around the map, and not to mention cosumables that help repair your vehicle instantly, so it’s not too difficult to keep from wrecking and transported to the nearest repair station. You can also order instant repairs from a satellite in orbit, but it requires that you stay still for 5 seconds, and it costs money.

I found PvE combat rather repetitive, and found myself wanting to fight other players more, as that tend to be more fun. Driving around doing missions in a racing game, even if it is a MMO, just doesn’t feel right. Your mileage may vary, however. Finding where to go next is made easy by a large orange arrow that sits at the top of your screen and points you towards the next objective. How you get there is up to you. One of the nice features of the map is being able to set your waypoint, and having a marker show up on your HUD. This will help you get from Point A to Point B if needed.

Right now, the game is still in beta for good reason. I’ve encountered lots of bugs, and the developers seem to be right on top of it, because everytime I start the game, I’m having to download a patch, and usually they’re pretty big patches. Since it is in beta, I won’t evaluate the stability of the game at this point.

I can’t help but feel that Auto Assault should’ve been a solid single-player racing game, with multiplayer thrown in, rather than a full scale MMORG with hundreds to thousands of players. It could’ve taken the throne of Carmegeddon, which many consider the king of vehical deathmatch for a long time. As a MMORG, it feels rather mediocre at best.