Auto Assault: 1UP - Preview and Hands-On

by Patrick Joynt 03/03/2006


"Remember, this morning, we were driving away through one of our bases, and the entire thing was just leveled by a meteor shower as we went past it," Scott Brown, president of developer NetDevil, interrupts his own presentation to ask his co-presenter. "We were through, and looked behind us, and wham! The whole middle of the base was just wiped out." The systems that let that happen add up to make Auto Assault what could be an incredibly promising, polished, and wonderfully different MMO when it launches in April. But remember one thing: this isn't an MMO where you play as a car -- you just happen to be in one most of the time.

In a sweeping introductory flyby, we learn that the world of Auto Assault was created by the energies released by alien ships landing up on the Earth some time ago. The Humans fled underground to live and wait for a time when they could reclaim the surface, while the Biomeks and Mutants found...other routes...to survival. And of course that's where you come in.

These three playable races each have classes that specialize in Combat, Tech, Theory, and Perception. It's definitely a bit Mad Max, but the scope NetDevil is aiming for is far beyond a desert full of ruins. During our time with the game, we sped and lumbered across snowy mountains, a horrific hive of massive contamination-spewing insect-like aliens, Tron-like territories where the AI units have taken over, and your "vanilla" ragged refuse-and-ruin heavy post-apocalyptic landscape.

We blew up everything that wasn't a weather effect. Auto Assault means it when it says it has "destructible environments" -- after a few timid moments of driving around things like walls, or people, or ancient ruins, we just started blowing them up. Virtually everything you smash into dust will yield quest items (for example, shattered glass), crafting items, or just loot to customize your ride with. We left the Biomek town of Root to go fend off the evil AI units in the neighboring area and had just a few moments of sparkles to gun the engine and avoid a meteor impact -- which promptly destroyed everything around it. If we'd ended up in the snowfield, we would have had to fight to keep control of the vehicle as it slid in the snow. All of this is even more important when you and your convoy of allies go to assault an enemy stronghold or seize an Outpost in PvP -- don't go looking for the gate in the wall; blast your way through and start running over defenders! Yep, PvP is entirely in cars, ala Twisted Metal.

Between the massive territorial struggles of Outpost play and the personal combat of Arena play -- where you can't even use items, keeping the playing field as level as possible -- NetDevil has taken a few ideas and really put a polish on them to make PvP as much fun as possible. PvP is only available in a limited number of areas, and those areas are pretty lewt-heavy. Every PvP map, however, has an easy to use drop-down function docked to the mini-map in the player's HUD that lets you simply jump into a PvE or PvP version of the map any time you aren't being attacked. Getting griefed? Consider going to the PvE side and getting a convoy to come re-grief the griefer...

A player character of any given level is worth the same XP as an NPC of a given level, but every PvP death in a given time period reduces that player's XP value to any players who kill him, reducing the value of ganking. That wasn't a typo, by the way -- that's XP you earn for killing players. The goal is to insure that whatever you're doing, you don't feel that you're taking away from building and growing your character. Human, Mutant, or Biomek, you and your ride start the game with plenty of customization options that only increase as you explore the world.

There are unique stories for each race, online rankings, cross-server PvP events, and a lot more to look forward to, but the real potential of Auto Assault is clearest when its developer's president stops his entire carefully laid out demo to talk about something cool that he and another player did that morning. We're looking forward to experiencing those situations ourselves come April.