Quick Review: Auto Age: Standoff

In case Fury Road wasn’t action-packed enough for you. Or silly enough, ‘cause now we have a Skeletor expy in the mix.

A creation from Canadian indie studio Phantom Compass and released on September 21st, 2017, Auto Age: Standoff is a primarily multiplayer game set in a post-apocalyptic America circa 2080. Resources are rare, peace hangs by a thread, and everyone’s busy killing each other off in fancy battle cars. Tsh, ruining each other’s paintjobs like that. It’s not right.

Before you learn to fight with a car, you gotta
learn to drive said car.

Let's blast this psycho's gang to smithereens.

The Tutorial also serves to explain the setting and provides a small Story Mode of sorts: Valentina (“Val”), ex-auto arena champion and currently courier, delivers a package in the Hot Dam. She’s ambushed on the way and barely makes it in. Unbeknownst to her, this area is home to SAIGE, an artificial intelligence that helped rebuild America after it went kablooey. Val’s old car is too busted to go forward, so SAIGE provides her with a new L-Type vehicle fitted with weapons to fight the wilderness. Unfortunately, the forces of the mysterious Dark Jaw, a blatant Skeletor parody right down to the voice, are trying to break into the Hot Dam to turn off SAIGE and get their hands on the limitless reserve of Energite (the thing that helped rebuild society) it protects. Val has to protect the AI, fighting with any vehicles and weapons provided to her. When it turns out that Dark Jaw is responsible for the death of Val’s sister, years prior in an auto arena competition, things get personal. You even get a cool boss battle! At the end of this, Val vows to bring order across the land against Dark Jaw’s gang, with help from SAIGE and other good factions.

Man, I legit wished there was an entire single-person campaign covering this.

Still, this tutorial does a fine job at covering the controls. WASD to move, obviously; left-click to use the primary weapon, right-click for the secondary weapon, swap between secondary weapons with the mouse wheel, or click said wheel to get a temporary speed boost (which you can use to ram into other enemies). The spacebar is used to drift and turn more tightly, and the Left Shift to jump. The car can still be steered in midair.

You’ll be using these controls in one of several game modes:

I'd say "Battle Royale time", but doesn't a
Battle Royale involve more participants?

-Deathmatch, in which you get points for destroying other cars;

-Elimination, a “Last man standing” type of challenge;

-Point Capture, in which you must hold on to the objective for as long as possible;

-Cube Command, which involves a “Hot Potato” type of gameplay in which the item players must hold on to is also damaging their vehicles;

-And Horde, available only in single-player, in which you play as either Val or the Dark Legion, and must defeat as many cars of the opposing faction as possible.

We can even get a better look at the cars
before jumping into battle.

All of these, barring “Horde”, can also be played with players split into teams. I like that you can choose among all the cars from the main sides of the conflict (good and bad), but also from secondary factions from either side. You can pick among all the vehicle types as well, be it the L-Type, M-Type, H-type or even T-type. So that’s pretty cool, and I get the feeling that the cars are fairly well-balanced (cars with more HP are either slower or take longer to reload, as an example).

Unfortunately, all I could test was the single-player options, as the multiplayer is barren. Not a single game in sight. Yeah, that’s the issue playing a mostly-multiplayer title: Trying it out long after interest has waned means that its main raison d’être is gone.

Had I known I would end up trying to fight
the boss with the slowest car, I would've changed!

That’s a shame, too, because I really liked what I got to play, and wished I could have tried to play against human opponents (I would have had my butt kicked, but it would have been fun to test anyway). The gameplay is fun, the cars are a bit tricky to control at first until you get the hang of their special abilities (ramming, hand-braking and jumping, in particular). The music is pretty good (and the theme during the boss battle at the end of the Tutorial kicks ass), the graphics look fantastic and help give this game some character, some uniqueness. Some animated cutscenes are also great. The cars have excellent designs, and the arenas feel grand and impressive.

Unfortunately, while you can play the game modes on your own (including a Tutorial that’s a very cool mini-Story Mode), the loss of its major selling point greatly diminishes the replayability. The addition of more options for single players might have helped with that. A larger campaign? I’d have played it to the end!

I don’t know if I would recommend it for its 9.99$ price tag as-is, but it IS a fun game on its own, if you can have fun with the single-player activities it offers.