Auto Assault was another in the line of futuristic MMOs. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans, biomeks and mutants fight for supreme reign and their own survival, it promised to deliver the first ever "car focused" MMO on the market. Basically Mad Max meets Twisted Metal. And how can you go wrong with that? The car combat genre really needed a revival at this point and who wouldn't like a MMO version of Twisted Metal?
Let's take it from the top.
You start of the game by molding your character. Right away the focus seems to be on your avatar - not your car - which is kind of strange. You get the impression that the avatar is more important, and as such spend more time with it then the car. The fact that the car customisation was so lacking also enforced this feeling. Little did you know that the whole "on foot" experience in this game would take up at a maximum 2 or 3 minutes of game play compared to 15 or so minutes of car combat. There was no avatar combat at all. You don't even see your character sitting inside the car through the car window, so what is the point? You only ever saw your character when visiting a town to sell your loot, deliver quests and get new ones. It felt like such a grind. I found myself just bunny hopping around the town like a maniac because I had no interest at all in staying there. Maybe you're thinking "but the avatar is good for social stuff" - no, because on the server I chose I only saw 2 or 3 other persons in the town, either because of poor player population or because of heavy instancing - I couldn't tell. It felt like this game had no community, which is probably one of the main reasons why it failed. Another reason was the car combat itself, the main selling point of this game.
The car combat was decent, but still not enjoyable. One of the things you have to sort out in a game where the player is mostly driving is the frame rate. You have to make sure the frame rate stays at a constant 30+ at all times. While some MMOs can get away with being played in even below 25 frames per second, a driving game suffers immensely from bad frame rates. Now some people would say "well get a better system". That's not the point. Even their later games such as Tabula Rasa (released in 2007) runs smoother on the same exact rig! Most of the bad frame rates, from what I can understand, came from the fact that this game had physics card compatibility. It was probably one of the earliest of such games, and they didn't really optimize the experience (if at all) for people without such cards.
Frame rates aside, combat seemed like it could actually have been fun. Driving and crashing into hordes of enemies could have been a fun experience. But most of the time I just found myself driving up to mobs, then just stay in one spot and grind them to death with my mounted gun. At least the shooting felt very arcade like and probably one of the few things that were fun about this game. Only problem was that it got repetitive way too fast. If you were planning on killing things to level up you would have to kill insane amounts of creatures to do so. To level up, the focus lied on questing. However, while that seems like a great idea, the quests felt even more of a grind compared to the combat. Every quest had a "go here, destroy this" objective. People, other vehicles, buildings - everything was to be destroyed. Sounds fun, for a few hours perhaps, but without any variety (how about throwing in an escort mission once in a while?) it got way too repetitive.
A few months after I played the game I got an email saying they would give away a free week of this game. At that point I just felt that I wouldn't even want play this game for free. It's however kind of sad that it died of completely, as some of the things in the game were really interesting concepts (although poorly executed) that could very well be seamlessly integrated to Tabula Rasa or their other projects. In fact, I would go as far as to say Tabula Rasa could have been the expansion that would have brought this game up from the gutter.
All in all, I couldn't recommend the game even if I wanted to: It has been taken offline.
And it was probably for the best.
