auto assault: traversing irradiated highways

In the future, there are cars with guns. Lots of guns. There are vast, unending reaches of post-apocolyptic wasteland to explore, in varying shades of brown and grey. And sometimes it rains, making the polluted atmosphere almost tangible as your headlights attempt to penetrate the gloom. Then the mutants come, the pallor of their tainted skins reflected in your high-beams. You mow them down with machine gun fire, one by one, running over a few for good measure. But they don't die. The machine gun only does 1-2 damage. The mutants rise again after your 2 tonne vehicle just ran headlong into a crowd of them. Something isn't right here.

Welcome to Auto Assault.

Auto Assault certainly succeeds at capturing the look and feel of a post-apocolyptic environment. The influences of movies like The Road Warrior and tabletop classic Car Wars are immediately obvious. The setup is that a plague spread across the Earth leaving three factions in its wake: the last humans who managed to find protection, the BioMeks who are mechanically enhanced humanoids, and the mutants, who braved the contamination and gained abilties of their own in the process. Each faction has four classes each, but upon close inspection there really wasn't much difference between them. I attributed that to the typical overbalancing that goes on with newly invented classes that don't fall into the typical mold of other RPGs (see rogues, healers, warriors - they are all pretty much the same in every game).

I levelled two characters for the beta: a level 5 human commando, and a level 8 BioMek agent. I spent quite a bit of time at the beginning tweaking my avatar's look with the game's many options, but I found this incongruous with the amount of customizing I can do with the class' default vehicle. Considering I spent 100% of my game time within my vehicle, I expected at the very least to decorate my car with a variety of decals and other assorted ornaments, though obviously nothing that would affect gameplay (such as a cow catcher - something I never found in the game, unfortunately).

Within the game, the "hard points", or major components are customizable. These are the weapons, armour plating or motor which can all be looted or purchased, and the game's skill and crafting system allows you to tweak the parts you do have or craft entirely new ones. This was a lot like the many spacefaring RPGs like Freelancer or even Jump to Lightspeed, and would be immediately familiar to veterans of that type of gameplay. To me, this is the meat of the game - creating mobile weapons of mass destruction that can be pitted against other players, or NPC driven vehicles. But things don't exactly work out that way. Players have to earn money and experience to increase their skills somehow, and this is where the conventions of MMORPGs are wedged in.

Combat is the lifeblood of most MMORPGs; it is the means by which rewards are obtained and ultimately the reason why we continue to play the game. As such, it should be consequential in spite of its repetitive nature, because it's what players are going to be spending 90% of the game doing. Halfway through Auto Assault's tutorial it became clear that the combat needs a lot of work for this game to succeed.

I'll get to the point: damage doesn't make any sense in this game. Introducing guns into the RPG is a difficult compromise. The skill and damage output can be left up to the player themselves, removing the need for points to be spent in this attribute, and focusing instead on bonuses to each hit. Or, the skill is left entirely to the amount of points spent, creating a kind of glass ceiling for gamers that are used to the behaviour of pointing the mouse to target a guaranteed hit. Jump to Lightspeed followed the former system; Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines held fast to the latter. In a game where the action is intended to be fast paced, this is a hinderance.

I think what it comes down to is reasonable expectations: when I rotate my vehicle's turret and target an enemy within range, I expect a hit rate of at least 90%. I don't want to see a chain gun emptying hundreds of bullets that do a possible 1-2 damage into an unarmoured targets in close proximity and then have most miss. But this is what ends up happening. As a result combat in Auto Assault degrades into holding down the "fire" button while driving around the target in circles, reminding me of some of the worst battles in Freelancer. Though there is a side effect to this approach, as weapons will overheat through extended use. Against tougher enemies this is a problem, but the fact that you can simply try and out maneuver your opponent by driving away makes this vulnerability a nonissue. Enemies on foot could take direct hits from my vehicle, and it usually took a couple of tries to actually run one over successfully. In a nice homage to Carmageddon, they erupt into a could of red. Other vehicles don't take much ramming damage, either. I'm giving the devs the benefit of the doubt here, and assume that my armour plating wasn't strong enough. Though something is telling me this system simply wasn't implemented. I also took no damage after crashing my car through buildings or into obstacles.

The majority of terrain, buildings, and obstacles are destructable - but it regenerates. This still provides some interesting side-effects to firefights, and is honestly the way it should be in a game that's so action-heavy. The physics are complete completely out to lunch, however. I can be stopped dead in my tracks by driving into an NPC, yet driving headlong up a cliff produces some fairly realistic responses in my vehicle. Driving overall feels sloppy, and while I don't expect precision controls, some noticable difference between driving an armoured car and a dune buggy should be expected.

What's worse is that there is no real penalty for death, as your car's "health" simply reaches zero and you are instantly transported to a repair station that will regenerate your vehicle's armour for free. And since repair stations are usually close to mission areas, there's no real time lost getting back to the task at hand. The worst I had to put up with was fighting off other players for a spot on one of the repair platforms. I had flashbacks of trying to obtain a tank at the beginning of a map in BF1942.

It's generally accepted that quests in World of Warcraft are repetitive, they just happen to change the environment in which they're given and executed. They end up feeling different (to a point), and along with the offered rewards allow players to forego the monotony. The quests in Auto Assault feel more like those of the original Star Wars Galaxies, before it turned into every other MMORPG (definitely a topic for another day). The NPCs in Auto Assault might as well be mission terminals, because the seemingly random Kill Ten Monsters or Deliver Part X to City Y quests are completely uninteresting and do little to enhance the gameworld for your particular race or class. There is a lot of travelling, too, and so having a vehicle right away is a bonus for new players who have to suffer through many levels in other MMORPGs before getting a mount or vehicle.

I presumed that the amount of driving at full throttle through the dune-scattered desert would result in some kind of sub-game that monitors tricks or style. I received some medals for significant air time, but that seems to be the extent of it. What about leaping off of a cliff to land in crowd of unruly scavengers or demolishing a building? There was a bonus for pretty much every stunt pulled in Carmageddon. Joined by the absurd levels of violence, it's part of what made the game interesting to play. The possible avenues of destruction available in Auto Assault make including these types of gameplay bonuses kind of obvious.

The post-apocolyptic, Road Warrior-styled setting is one that is ripe for material, yet has never really been exploited by games. As such, Auto Assault could have easily differentiated itself from its competitors. Instead, it suffers from its desire to become the next big clickfest MMOG. It's unfortunate that the game's designers have clumsily grafted the standard MMORPG model onto a setting that doesn't require it. The action-heavy gameplay would be fine for casual sessions that encourage players to do battle with each other. Vehicle upgrades and tweaking add enough depth to the gameplay that encourages a long term investment. However this insistence on having character "levels" doesn't suit the material when most of the game is encountered while driving. As a result Auto Assault is reduced to the tired old grind, which undermines the entire setting. It becomes easier for prospective players to detach the game world from its underpinnings - they will gladly pay the same montly fee for something like World of Warcraft instead. Put simply, Auto Assault just isn't that much fun, and the lack of any real discerning factor from its contemporaries make it a tough sell in an already saturated market.

Note: These thoughts are based on the weekend beta event that took place from January 27th to January 31st, 2006. I understand there have been some significant improvements in the game since the beta launched last year, but that means absolutely nothing when the product I'm playing is not any good.