Xymox

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 massive 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.

Second Life is a virtual-life chat client / virtual shopping mall where you create your character and then interact with people and buy stuff. Anyone familiar with Active Worlds or IMVU should feel right at home. But for convenience, though, I'll refer to it as a game from here on out.

I would also state that this will be a review from a "free user" perspective - as such I will not enter the creator or business aspects of the game.

So in Second Life you start of by creating an account with a first name for your character and then select a last name from a list of pre-set ones. You also select a base look for your avatar. As the game starts of you're greeted with a basic tutorial like one would expect, but even so the tutorial doesn't quite remove the feeling of "What am I supposed to do?" and "Where am I supposed to go?" even when you're done with it.

On a first glance the character creation looks very in-depth, so much in fact that it would rival the creation system of Age of Conan, City of Heroes or Star Wars Galaxies. Sadly though, I found most of the sliders, such as skin tone or make-up, didn't actually do anything at all. This is probably because you actually have to unequip the gear from the original avatar you selected at account creation, which to be honest should be automated. So I tried making a new t-shirt for my character instead and thought I would toss up a sweet band logo on the front of it but it seemed I couldn't really do that, because it would cost money to upload a texture. So the deeper part of the customisation isn't really available to a free account user, which is a bummer in a social game.

It's good, at least, that you can edit your character at any time and an unlimited amount of times, even to the point where you can change the gender of your avatar. So if you're not happy with that first appearance you can always change it on demand. Often when changing the looks of my character, however, someone would accidentally bump in to me, messing up my camera view. Characters in the game world have mass to them, so you can't walk through people. This is good, but not when you're trying to change your outfit.

When I started to feel done with the looks of my character I began walking around. Now, the default controls shouldn't be too tricky; you use your arrow keys instead of WASD or click-to-move movement, and the camera controls are pretty basic: Zoom with the scroll wheel, freelook if you zoom all the way into first person, and interact with people or objects by clicking or right clicking, but the controls might still need some time to get used to.

As I finally ended up in the main world I have to say I was pleasantly surprised to hear people voice chatting like crazy - it made it seem like people actually care about this game. Sadly, like in any game that supports voice chat, you're bound to hear random stuff playing over peoples microphones like scenes from old movies, TV shows or other games. But hey, that's not really the games fault. Looking around, I could see quite the variety in characters, including a huge T-Rex walking around - so there seems to be a huge character customisation available should you decide to pay for stuff.

It didn't take long until my character was interacted with: a friend request and a vampire bite that now adorns my characters neck. That said, this game is very much a social experience, so if you don't enjoy social encounters or settings this game will probably not be for you. You can, of course,  fly or teleport around to explore different areas, but the main aspect of the game is really the social stuff. At the core this is basically an MMORPG with everything but the social and exploration aspects cut. Which brings me to my biggest pet peeve in this game. The social aspect of this game feels hindered by the fact that you need to buy stuff. And I'm not talking about grinding for a week to afford that new shiny armour: I'm talking about paying real money for stuff in the game. Now, the game portrays itself as a free-to-play game, and its not uncommon for such games to have a system where players can buy extra stuff for money, and I'm not complaining about that. The thing I'm complaining about is the fact that you need to grind if you intend to stay as a free player. Because to get money as a free player there are certain things you can do in the game world in specific locations - for example dancing in a club or sitting on a park bench - and these things will earn you money. The going rate is something like 10 linden dollars per 250 minutes of sitting on a bench or something, and while the amount of money will differ from place to place, you'll be quite bummed out when you look at that sweet piece of clothing you wanted to buy as the cost of those will range into the hundreds. Now, I understand the underlying philosophy of this; people need some kind of incentive to hang around in some places. But this is a social game! This need to grind defeats the purpose of the game itself: Instead of having people sit on a bench and chat with eachother, people are watching TV in real life while their second life character grinds for money... It's just a badly thought out system.

At least the graphics in Second Life are (for the most part) fine for an old (and also free) game, but the noticeable pop-in is absolutely horrible. Sometimes it feels like you would rather have a five minute load screen then to teleport to a new area and see nothing there and suddenly have objects apare out of nowhere. This is especially annoying in shops where the images of the things you can buy load so slow you wonder why you even bothered going there. And most of the time the pictures in the shop are so blurry that even if you DO stick around for the loading to complete, it still doesn't feel worth it because you can't see what it is you are buying. This is actually caused by the game first uploading a blurry low-res texture to your computer, and then you download the higher resolution version. This quickly becomes very annoying, even to someone with a good internet connection.

Another thing that I felt needs to be said is that there is a whole lot of adult content in this game. Pretty much every mature rated zone I visited had some form of nudity in it, everything from the human body as art to hard core porn. So I said screw it, lets buy a pair of nipple textures for my character. Little did I know the description on how to apply this new texture was almost as blurry as the pictures themselves, and the texture is nowhere to be found. I have it in my recent items, but when trying to apply it as a tattoo for my character as the description said I should do, the texture just isn't there. So however you're supposed to do it its way to over-complicated for the average user. It actually turned out I was supposed to drop the box with the content I bought and then claim my items from the box - only problem is finding a zone where users are actually allowed to drop stuff into the game world in the first place! So I'm looking around for a desolate patch of land that allows me to drop items, and also have some kind of privacy so I can take a look at my newly aquired virtual nipples to see what all this fuss is about - and that's when I felt just no, this is way way way too complicated then it needs to be. A game where the fundamentals is to buy and socialize shouldn't have to have such flaws.

Bottom line is, until these issues are fixed, I can't recomend this at all. There is however no doubt that you might get some fun out of the game if you are willing to overlook the flaws and spend the time and money needed to figure stuff out.