And off we go again, back on the Free Trial Trail. A change is as good as a rest, they say, and I’m starting with Auto Assault. I’ll save the proper ‘review’ until the two weeks is up, but having spent a good couple of sessions in there now, some first impressions wouldn’t go a miss.
Getting into the Trial is pretty straight forward – you need a PlayNC account, (which I already had from when I bought Nightfall online), a serial code from here (or here if like me you’re in the UK), and the game client from here. It doesn’t need credit card details, just a valid email address, and weighs in at just under 3GB to download, which in today’s Broadband world, isn’t such a massive hardship – took me about two hours or so, which I spent watching Hot Fuzz on DVD. (Great film, and if anything even better than Shaun of the Dead!)
Getting the thing to run on the other hand was a minor pain, mostly in the form of a ‘Missing MSXML4.0’ pop up which dumped me back to desktop. Not a great start, and you’d expect the installer to take care of that. If the thing won’t run first time from the desktop shortcut, many people would give up right there. Still, I didn’t have anything better to do, and found a helpful thread on their forums, here, which got me running without too much tinkering.
The intro cutscene was suitably interesting and fun. Turns out that those pesky Aliens have bombed the Earth with some kind of green gooey ick. This ick killed lots of people, which was probably the idea, but also changed some people into Mutants, which probably wasn’t. I always wondered where Orcs came from, and now I know! The remaining Humans decide that creating an army of brutal cyborg killing machines, with no ethical safeguards whatsoever, to wipe the Mutants out couldn’t possibly go wrong and these become the Biomeks, and do indeed go wrong. Humanity, deciding that things have gotten a bit out of hand, opt for the ‘Etch-a-Sketch End-Of-The-World’, Plan B, which apparently seemed to consist of heading for the Underground Bunkers, and then Nuking the Entire World, which I think is a tad drastic, but sets the stage for the world of Auto Assault – a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which the surviving members of the three races, Human, Biomek and Mutant, battle for supremacy in the ashes of a burnt-out continental Interstate system.
Enter me, stage left! (And indeed, driving on the left, don’tcherknow!)
Character creation is painless, looking much like WoW’s, but with more customisation options, including notably, a bit where you work on the car too. The car is quite central to the gaming experience here, being much more than a simple player mount, and if anything, it’s the avatar that’s the accessory, not the car. Something that did seem quite counter-intuitive in a driving MMO, is the idea of Character Classes. There are four to choose from, which seem to very roughly correspond to Warrior, Priest, Warlock and Rogue, but only in the loosest sense – a front line combat one, a construction type one (who can presumably heal others), a pet-control and debuff class and some kind of light high-speed dps class, (which may or may not have stealth – I’ll have to check)
This seems mostly to manifest in the types of skills you get, and the class of chassis you have access to. The Warriors seem to be SUVs, the Priests get larger camper-van types of vehicle, the Warlocks get more sporty coupes and the Rogues get light buggies of various types. I’ve only played one type so far, so hard to say how this makes the game different for each, but for all types, the basic game seems fairly similar anyway – driving about, blowing stuff up!
Not wanting to get too bogged down in all that, I just went for whichever seemed the coolest at the time, the Biomek Mastermind (their Warlock variant), and off we go, into the newbie tutorial bit. The Biomeks seem the most ‘Mad Max’ of the three, with the Mutants being a bit of an organic shamanistic type of outfit, and the Humans being big into neon underlighting.
Now I hate driving games, in general, so was expecting to have a really hard time liking Auto Assault, but very quickly it dawned on me that this was only really a ‘driving game’ to a point, and what I was actually playing, was a much more normal kind of MMO, but on wheels, at speed, with big guns, and on necessarily larger maps. Control is not tricky to get the hang of – the WASD keys to steer – Space Bar to yank the handbrake and the mouse deals with the gunnery. Fuel and ammunition are (mercifully) infinite, so there’s none of the nightmarish ‘checkpoint’ nonsense usually found in more traditional racing games.
You start life with a monster of a roof-mounted chain-gun turret, which is a blast to let rip with, and a smaller fixed forward-arc machine-gun on the front bumper. Both of these have a hud arc overlaid on the terrain, and to shoot something, you just need to mouseover it and the turret swivels it’s arc to point at it and if you’re in range, click RMB to go crazy. At that point the stats and dicerolls take over, working out if you hit, and how much damage, resitance, and so on. To do better damage, you need to bring the fixed front guns to bear also, and this requires you to steer the whole car to face the target. You can also select a target, in the usual manner, and the roof turret will try to auto track it as you fire and drive about, but you still need to do the front gun aiming yourself, and of course, stay in range.
It’s a pleasing system that combines a little bit of FPS, (or rather driving,) reflex skill, with the traditional stats and dice, making for a much more hands-on and involved type of gaming than just working the stats alone, as in WoW/EQ2/GW/etc. For those that aren’t great at driving games, like myself, the pet classes are quite forgiving. Right from the word go, I was given a skill that creates an ‘MG-Mek’ – a kind of large monowheel robot with machineguns where it’s hubcaps should be, and this little tearaway happily follows me about, attacking my targets, guarding me, and all the other usual behaviours one would expect from an MMO minion or pet, and isn’t too shabby a combatant. I’ve since also earned a hovering laser-gun pet, and bipedal artillery pet and a flying saucer whose function is to buff my group and debuff the enemy, paladin aura-style. It seems to cap out at three pets in control at once, but that’s plenty for what I need – my car isn’t exactly the ‘bloke in a dress’ you’d expect to be in control of these pets, and is satisfyingly powerful in its own right.
Satisfying…that’s a word I keep coming back to when thinking about my first impressions of the game. Everything is loud, noisy, explosive, fast. Death penalty is light – you just get your wreck airlifted to the last repair pad you used, which in themselves are convenient and plentiful, and off you go again – nothing lasting or permanent beyond that. All you really lose is the time it takes to get back to where you blew up last. The car has slots in which you put the various weapons, armour, wheels, and engines you find, craft or buy, and you do gain power through equipment and stats, but the very immediate emphasis on burning rubber and shooting stuff takes greater precedence than the desperate acquisition of shineys and +1’s, certainly at these early stages anyway, and I’m finding I’m quite capable of taking down ‘yellow’ enemies with stuff I’ve looted almost by accident.
The familiar colours are here too – enemy difficulties, the mission journal, crafting difficulty, ‘magic’ item loot. I try to avoid comparisons to WoW, but it’s not easy, and in any case, not necessarily a bad thing. So many people have played that thing that it becomes a sort of de facto frame of reference for all things MMO, and doing things differently for no other reason than to ‘Not Be WoW’ is not helpful, and can just confuse players. The Red-Bar and Blue-Bar are here too, (although actually green and yellow in this case), in the form of car HP and power-plant. The power-plant powers the special attacks, mana-style, but here, those seem to be more ‘talent-like’, than being simply something that comes with the levelling. When you ‘ding’, you spend points in the AA equivalent of talent trees, and get the buttons from there instead. Mind you, it’s perfectly viable to fight without touching a hotkey once, I find, although the pets do help. The default attack isn’t just something you do while waiting for the little clocks to expire here, it’s quite potent in it’s own right, and the skills – well, mine anyway – seem more ‘in addition to’, rather than ‘instead of’. Perhaps further in, I’ll have to work much harder though.
The Hotbar doesn’t seem to be nearly as important or as frequently used here as in other MMOs though, and mostly, it’s just about driving around like a madman, blowing stuff up. And boy is there a lot of that – the NPC enemies I’ve met so far range from pedestrians (generally trivial, but dangerous if you get mobbed to badly – squish!) to other cars similarly tooled up, right up to Boss rocket-launching snowtrucks that drop land mines as you chase them across the ice. (WTB: Snowchains of Determination +3!)
And of course lots and lots of damageable buildings. I don’t think I’ve ever had that much fun gathering resources in any MMO ever! It’s a salvage-based scrap economy, as you’d expect, but instead of farming ‘Rusty Girder Pile’ spawns over and over, here, you just drive, preferably at full speed, at the nearest scavenger village, guns blazing and the place explodes and collapses in a very pleasing manner. Once the gun-totting pedestrian scavengers have been squished, and the rubble has stopped exploding, simply drive around over the glowing pickups and the stuff loads itself into cargo, for your later perusal. Loot works the same, and helps maintain the high pace of it all – no stopping to ‘use’ corpses every twenty seconds – just do a few handbrake turns over the wreckage and you’re good to go!
You do get to get out of the car, but only in the town ‘hubs’, making the avatar itself little more than eye-candy. For the purposes of actual play, you are your car, but that’s okay. The whole town bits could just as easily be done with a window-based menu system, such as EVE Online’s stations, but I do like it this way, expanding on the look and feel of it all, and giving you a bit more of a context in which to ‘be’. Several of the mission chains available in the first town do a very good job of expanding on the lore of the Biomeks, the lands around the place and the people in them, hinting at a depth of backstory I really wasn’t expecting, but am quite getting into.
More to come of course, but so far, it’s immensely enjoyable, and a breath of fresh air. I’m level 14 or so already, and honestly didn’t notice it happening, which is always promising in an MMO. Whether there’s anything nasty lurking under the longer-term gameplay rocks, we’ll have to see, but in any event, I’d highly recommend the free trial at least, if you’re looking for a bit of a break or a go at something unusual….
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