Sidetrek: Auto-Assault

Woot. Tried out this game today during their Road Rage Weekend...

Afraid to say I'm of mixed minds about it. The starting game was pretty durned good. Tutorial held you by the hand and walked you through it. The opening cinematic for the Biomek race was stellar, I'm sure the others are good too. Quests were interesting at first, and helped you gain xp at a pretty good clip.

There were tricky spots at first. It was a challenge to figure out how to drive well and how to operate the weaponry and improve one's skills, but as time wore on, one got the hang of it all.

Nitpick would be that the humanoid walking around in town is VERY jerky movement. Made me a little sick every time I had to step into town to get a quest done. Driving was good, if a little dizzying, and it was both disconcerting yet fun to chase enemy mobs like a fighter plane (your weapons are most effective in front cos of the overlap) and those lil buggers would keep zipping away from view.

I found myself enjoying the game at first. The progress rate was pretty addictive, and I ended up playing most of the day away.

But (and you knew there would be a 'but' coming) I find myself asking, is this it?

Granted, destructible environments and driving around blowing shit up is fun. But I blew shit up for like 15 hours, and there's a limit to how many explosions is entertaining for me. The quests got longer and more tedious. If I had a dollar for every time I had to drive over to revisit town and jerkily run through town to reach some contact...urgh.

Call me spoiled but after City of Heroes and Guild Wars, I can only stand playing errand boy so long before I start wanting a cell phone or an insta-zoning map.

And here's another place I think I've been spoiled. CoX has a brilliant teaming system, one that makes it easy to get a team, and one where it is interesting and fun to play as a team, rather than confusing. GW has the henchmen system and it's easy to get a PUG there, thanks to the lobby rooms before missions, but cooperation can be tricky there because of the umpteen different skills and knowledge levels of players. Auto-Assault, alas, does not seem to accomodate teaming very much.

There is some kind of "Looking for convoy" flag, but I have no clue how it looks since I was the only stupid bugger who put it up, hoping to find a team. Instead, I ended up on a "pity mission" to help some poor sap out with his quest because there were mobs he couldn't kill - thanks to inadequate gear. Nothing was highlighted for the team, I was shooting stuff out of guesswork and just wrecking stuff around the chap hoping that my kills would pop the items he needed.

Not exacly my idea of a good team, which is a shame because a lot of the skills look like they were designed to function in synchronization between the classes, in a racial convoy, hooking together.

Everyone seemed much more interested in going it solo for this weekend. Possibly because AA is sooo relaxed that it allows you to.

See, the death penalty is...nothing. That's right, nothing. That's a good thing, right? It should be. GW has zero death penalty - the implied penalty is that you gotta redo the mission again. Sometimes ad nauseam, but there you go. AA, alas, has the same sort of ad nauseam effect, and to add insult to injury, you have to sit and wait at a repair pad for your health to pulse upwards - brooding over the fact that having an engineer/healer class on your team would have negated this necessity...but no one would be such a good samaritan as to make a dedicated 'rez' class, would they? Not unless they were a bunch of RL friends playing as a team. And then you gotta drive back to the exact same spot to finish your mission - which is usually finding some 'named mob' to collect more 'rat tails' of some sort.

Not good. I've barely played a day and I'm starting to get severely bored with the gameplay. The concept of crafting is interesting, but I stop becoming interested when I realize you have to keep clicking on a button, watching a progress bar develop, so that your crafting skill develops, so that you can make bigger and better stuff. Repetition again.

I dunno. CoX is repetitive, but you can 'roleplay' in CoX in a way. You can immerse yourself into the character and pretend to be a superhero/villain. I find immersion much more difficult when it's a CAR driving along, collecting this and that. And the unpredictability of CoX is the PUG. I wouldn't be able to play CoX for long without the craziness of a pickup team.

Kinda sad, in a way. I was already gearing up to consider investing in Auto-Assault, but it looks like I may as well just play out the Road Rage Weekends and leave it be. Unless something develops along the way.

From the AA forums though, a chance post is now pointing me in the direction of considering giving D&D online a try. The description of the missions sound damn interesting. Why? Teamwork. Instanced 'dungeon.' XP awarded at the END of dungeon. Giving rise to actually being able to complete objectives for each dungeon. Player classes with distinct roles.

Maybe it's worth trying out the game for a month or two. The only thing I worry about is the whole loot city deal. I can't deal with loot these days. :/ I don't want to have to think about which weapon is the best, which armor is the best, and have to strive to go get it or be gimp. :(

Another reason why it looks like Auto-Assault won't survive past my free playtest. The whole loot shebang.

Oh well.