Auto Assault

If you thought that Los Angeles traffic was bad, then you haven’t seen anything yet.

Auto Assault is the massively multiplayer online role-playing game from NetDevil and NCsoft that takes a different approach to the MMP market. The title was shown off at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles and GameZone was fortunate enough to get a look at this title, which is slated for release at the end of the year.

Auto Assault is a different kind of game. Players are basically in charge of automobiles, although one of the factions available, the biomek, is capable of morphing into a walking robot.

The setting is a post-apocalyptic future where an alien race has pushed mankind beyond the brink of destruction. The world is a shambles and into this setting is a Mad Max setting where cars, semis and motorcycles, armed with a variety of weapons roam across the world, killing aliens, destroying the environment and working through the storyline.

But don’t let the prospect of a storyline steer you away from this free-roaming title. NetDevil president Scott Brown was rather matter-of-fact in stating that:

“We wanted to make sure we were choosing fun over realism,” he stated.

The game feature lush graphics, volumetric shadowing and a solid sound track. The game uses the Havoc engine and that means rag-doll physics. While the environments are destructible, they will respawn within minutes so that all players can have the joy of destroying the world time and again.

There is a crafting system which has been simplified and at the early levels, there is a 100% success rate. It is a matter of dropping components onto a blueprint. Customization occurs when you begin to drop more onto a blueprint than is asked for. The success rate will drop, but the chances of creating a unique item goes up.

The vehicles are customizable and players can have a garage of vehicles, choosing the right one for every instanced mission.

Not only are the missions instanced, but they are backwards compatible. A player may have a mission, and the environments are completely destructible and once destroyed, they will remain that way each time the player enters the mission. Players who have not been to a certain point in the mission, like say a destroyed bridge, will not be able to jump in and join a mission in progress. However, a player who is further along in a mission can go backwards and join a mission at an earlier point.

The three factions are the humans, biomeks and mutants. Each has special abilities. There are two types of player-versus-player modes in the game, outpost battles (factions gain slight ability enhancements when they capture an outpost and battle for the area resources) and arena battles.

The game will also support a variety of controllers, from the mouse-and-keyboard combination to gamepads, joysticks and wheels.

Auto Assault appears to be the type of game that is just what Brown stated it was – all about fun. It is about finding loot and items, blasting the world and alien hordes to bits and roaring down the highway of adventure.

For All E3 2004 Previews