Auto Assault Mk II

[Outbound]

I thought I'd bring up Auto Assault again now that it's out...
I got on for only a couple of hours but it certainly held my interest the whole time. It seemed to me to basically be like a fast-paced dungeon crawler. At the beginning you only have a top-mounted turret, the primary operation of which involves clicking on an enemy to select him, then holding the fire button, which will hit randomly depending on your hit rate and whether you're in range. The weapons show you a damage per second which helps determine whether you want to choose the slow firing or fast firing ones.

Later you get a front firing and a rear firing gun which spray in an area directly in front/behind you which adds to the skill element of the game; with the top turret all you have to do is stay close to the enemy, while the front-mounted required you to manuever your vehicle to face the enemy. I never got ahold of a rear gun, as I didn't play very long. Driving around shooting like mad was pretty exciting, and the only consequence to dying was having to drive back from the nearest town, so I tended to be a little less careful than I'd be in most types of games.

All in all I liked the fast pace of it but I never got to a part that required it to be an MMO at any point. A friend and I "convoyed" which helped out a lot but it wasn't always synching our quests like you'd think it would. We both had a lot of fun but for the type of thing we were doing it never once required any large groups.

As far as classes go, I liked the mage and stealth type characters. The mage was decently powerful in attacking but had a summon that was useful as well as buffing spells. The stealth seemed to have a good damage output but also had attack spells and cloaking capabilities. I especially liked its basic Sonic attack spell that would obliterate any single enemy. I tried playing the medic class but couldn't stand the look of it - they get a bus - and it seemed much slower, whether it actually was or not. I barely touched the fighter class but I noticed it could do aggro boosting attacks that would come in handy in party situations. Definitely not my type of class though.

I'd like to try it sometime down the road and see what they've done with PVP, which I never got to see. I do know that I didn't like the town structure they had... you have to run all over town to get anything done and I found myself wishing you could just bring up one store for everything, then get back to the action, all through menus. The non-PVP stuff that I did try seemed like Diablo or Dungeon Siege in a vehicle... with a little of driving skill involved if you were relying on your main weapons. I really enjoyed it, and I thought the driving brought a great unique aspect to the game, but it definitely wasn't something I'm going to run out and pick up.

Did anyone play the beta long enough to let us know how the PVP is?

[rhonnin]

Road and I both played the beta, the few times we played together the quests seemed to sync up well, he was playing the engineer class and I played the warrior one when we were together, personally I enjoyed it but not enough to pay monthly for it, a game like that I think is perfect for advertising supported play with the adventure areas being ruined stretches of highway just crying out for a Fanta billboard. A few times we got into situations a bit beyond us and another groupmember or two would've been a big help but for the most part there is plenty of solo/duo content.
Part of what appealed to me I think was the upgrading of your vehicle, there were weapon and armor upgrades of course but also tires to improve handling, engines for speed and power use as well as various other things to improve performance, oh and things like spikes, paint and such to trick out the look. At higher levels you can buy a different vehicle so you wouldn't be stuck in the bus forever if you wanted to play the healer class. I made characters from each race and several classes but never made it passed lvl 9 so didn't get to try any of the PVP, I did try to join some arena play but there were never any arena battles going on when I checked. All in all I can't say anything bad about the game, it was fun and well, I didn't really find out enough about the PVP to form an opinion beyond saying there is alot of possibilty there.