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Auto Assault MMORPG Mini-Review |
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Written by Michael Salsbury
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Monday, 30 October 2006 |
I've been playing NCSoft's Auto Assault MMORPG as much as I can for the last couple of weeks. I've managed to take one character as high as level 18 in that time, and another to level 9. Below is a mini-review and my general impressions of the game based on the time I've spent with it so far...
THE GAME AND ITS WORLD
The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans, mutants, and cyborgs are fighting it out for supremacy. Players assume the role of characters in this world who fight their enemies, gather resources to make needed items, craft those items, and sell them. There is something of a storyline within the game, but it is by no means a fixed and linear progression. Players are free to go about doing whatever they like in the game world, though doing the pre-defined "missions" offered in the game serve to advance the story line and level up the character.
Players run a local client program on their PCs which interacts with a central game server shared by all the players online at that time. Players can interact with one another and, under certain circumstances and with mutual agreement, fight one another. The graphics in the game are on par with most current shooters but notches below games such as Half Life 2 or F.E.A.R. as one would expect from an MMORPG. (Too much detail would likely require too much bandwidth.)
As your character gains levels, additional parts of the game world become accessible.
CHARACTERS
You can choose from 3 main classes in the game: Biomek, Human, and Mutant. Biomeks are cyborgs, part human and part machine. Their mechanical parts enable them to survive the contamination in the wastelands of the game. Humans are like you and I, and are protected by contamination through electronic shielding and technology. Mutants are naturally protected from the contamination in the world.
Each class has four sub-classes, which (although named differently) perform more or less the same functions. The first class is a Fighter class. These characters are optimized for combat. The second class is the Builder class, which serves primarily to construct needed equipment in the game, and acts as a healer for the other classes. The third is the "Mastermind" class, which controls an group of NPCs which help the character or its group attack and defend. Finally is the "Agent" class, which is focused primarily on being hidden and being able to sap energy from its victims.
I've played both Fighter and Builder class characters. If you're into action and combat, the Fighter is likely to be your favorite character. If you're more into crafting, scavenging, and trading, the Builder will be your favorite.
If you ever played Earth and Beyond, this breakdown of character classes will seem very familiar. In that game, we had pure fighters, builders, and explorers. The Auto Assault fighters and Earth and Beyond fighters are essentially the same character type. The Auto Assault Agent class is a lot like the Explorers in Earth and Beyond. The Auto Assault Builder class is a lot like the Earth and Beyond builders.
LEVELING
At least up to level 18, I've found it fairly easy to level "solo" in Auto Assault. Spend your game time killing anything that will give you experience, do as many missions as you're capable of, and you'll find that you level fairly quickly.
CRAFTING AND SELLING
Crafting seems to be an extremely difficult part of Auto Assault. There are 3 parts to a crafting skill. First, you must pay someone to unlock that skill and give you a basic expertise level. Before you can grow that expertise to another level, you must gain experience with the level you have. Gaining experience involves buying or looting items whose level of difficulty is near your level of experience, "reverse engineering" those items, then attempting to build them repeatedly. To build or repair an item, you must first loot or obtain from another player the appropriate components. You'll need a bunch of the right components to practice a particular build, and you'll find that it fairly quickly goes from being "difficult" to make to being "trivial". When it becomes trivial, you'll stop gaining experience from making it. This makes it necessary for you to keep obtaining and breaking more items and gathering the different components needed to fix/build them. The time and financial (in game money) investment in building crafting skills, for me, took away considerably from my desire to learn them.
As if the crafting issue wasn't difficult enough, Auto Assault severely limits the number of items you can make. I believe the top end limit is that you can memorize 12 different "formulas" for items you can craft. To memorize another, you have to give up the slot for one of the existing 12. In other games, such as the aforementioned Earth and Beyond, you are able to memorize a virtually unlimited number of formulas. This makes it possible for crafters to become valuable to the game community, since they can crank out any item a player might want. The limitation of 12 formulas in Auto Assault means that a given builder is only useful to a group of players if they happen to want one of the 12 items he or she can make.
One of the big issues that hurt Earth and Beyond was the lack of a centralized way for players to buy and sell items of interest. For example, (in that game) if I looted a reactor with my fighter that wasn't usable by fighters, the best course of action for me would be to sell that to another player who could use it. In that game, I had to use a chat channel to connect with other players until I could find someone who happened to be online when I was and who also happened to be interested in that particular item. It was a very ridiculous and primitive system for a game that was supposed to be set in a distant future. We had galaxy-wide communications in that game, but no one in the universe had thought to make the equivalent of eBay?
Auto Assault, it appears, may suffer from the same problem. Most of the chat traffic I saw was from people who were trying to buy, sell, or trade items they'd looted. There doesn't seem to be a central market for buying and selling in-game items. If there is, it must be connected to that very expensive "catalog" terminal I read about in my in-game "apartment". You need to accumulate a lot of in-game cash to buy that terminal, and I've never been able to hold onto that much yet, though I've been trying.
So the bottom line is, at least up to character level 18, I've found the crafting system in Auto Assault to be unnecessarily limited, while being simultaneously difficult to grow. Since I enjoy the crafting aspects of MMORPGs, this is a big disappointment for me in the game.
COMBAT
Combat in Auto Assault is relatively simple and straightforward. Your vehicle may potentially be armed with front, rear, turret, and melee weaponry. The front and rear weapons have arcs within which they can hit a target. The turret can swing around and track an enemy in any direction. The melee weapons only kick in when you're in contact with the enemy. For some enemies, ramming is definitely a viable tactic.
You obtain weapons by purchasing them from NPC vendors (though these are the weaker weapons), looting them from enemies in the game (which will yield better weapons), or purchasing player-crafted items from other players (the best option, if you can find a player who makes one you want, can afford his price, etc.).
Weapons do different types of damage, such as physical, electromagnetic, or radiation. These damage types are more effective against some enemies than others. Thus, you'll want to keep an assortment of weapons in your locker and swap them out depending on the type of combat you expect to encounter. You can also keep weapons in your vehicle's storage and swap them out on the fly.
Aside from getting the enemy into your weapon's firing arc and pressing the trigger, there isn't a lot of skill involved in combat in the game. Your "twitch" driving ability will certainly help you prevail, but weaker enemies will fall under the onslaught of your turret weapon even if you aren't the best driver.
MISSIONS
The game's missions are reasonably varied given the premise. Most missions involve one or more of the following:
- Follow a series of waypoints and report back.
- Visit one or more locations, take readings, and report back.
- Destroy some number of some enemy unit or structure and report back.
- Collect one or more of some item and report back.
Perhaps there will be different missions at the levels above 18, but I haven't seen others yet.
On the one hand, the lack of mission variety detracts a little from the game. On the other hand, as you advance in levels the tasks do become a bit more difficult. For example, early missions of the "take readings at this location" will involve little or no contact with the enemy. Later missions will require you to dispatch all the nearby enemy units (which may prove difficult) before you can successfully get the readings. So while there is a certain redundancy to this, the level of challenge is fairly consistent.
COST
My local Target store is closing out copies of Auto Assault at about $5, which includes a month of game time. Future months of game time will require the payment of a monthly fee. I forget the exact amount, but it's under $15.
BOTTOM LINE
The bottom line is whether I will continue the game beyond the 30-day trial period. I don't know that I will. While I'm enjoying it, I'm not sure I'm really enjoying it enough to justify $15 a month when there are other single-player games that are similar enough to provide the same enjoyment.
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