Platform: X-box 360
Published by: Sega
Price: US$54.99
If you’re thinking that Full Auto is basically Burnout with guns, well, you’re not too far from the truth. Full Auto bears a lot of resemblance to the EA racing/destruction series, and if you’ve ever played Burnout before, you’ll realize that’s not a bad thing at all.
Full Auto puts you behind the wheel of a variety of fictional cars equipped with guns, explosives, and other devices seemingly ripped from a James Bond film. You’ll race against up to 8 opponents at a time, battling it out for 1st place among a variety of tracks and locations. There’s a few different modes of racing you’ll encounter in the game and online, which help to break up the monotony one might find by doing simple races over and over.
There is no overarching storyline to be found, which is just as well, because the game doesn’t need one. You’ll start off in a series of training modes that’ll slowly familiarize you with the basics of Full Auto, and from there you’re off into a series of “circuits” that involve nearly a dozen races each. There’s actually quite a few tracks and circuits, and while the game never manages to become overly challenging, it does end up being a bit lengthy for the average player.
The vehicles all control like an arcade racer should, nice and tight with very little to worry about when it comes to overcompensating from turns or slight twitches at the wheel. Power sliding is a key factor to races, mostly when it comes to out-cornering your opponents and building up your boost meter. Even certain weapons have independent controls, allowing you to pull up next to someone, turn the gun towards them, and blast away. Each side of the car has a set of armor to it, once that armor has been demolished, it will typically only take one hit to blow your car to hell and back.
The online modes consists of everything you’ll find in the main game. You don’t have to unlock everything in career mode to appreciate their use in the online game, which is fantastic for those that just want to jump in and battle it out with their friends. Like most of the Xbox Live games, it’s easy to find a match, set one up, search for a specific mode, etc. I never experienced any issues with lag either, so that’s a plus.
There are some problems with the overall game, mostly on the technical side. There’s a lot of stuff that can go on onscreen, from explosions, gunfire, multiple cars (both opponents and pedestrians) and all of this manages to bog down the framerate quite a bit. If this were a PS2, or XBOX game, I’d be a bit more forgiving, but when it comes to something custom made for a next generation system, it’s disappointing at best. It’s not an ‘every-so-often’ type of thing either, you’ll encounter framerate issues in nearly every race.
The game does look incredibly nice, as it should, but its nothing we’ve not seen before. The car models are particularly spiffy, able to accurately show reflection from the objects around them, and the explosions are very detailed. The music, however, is standard video game stuff, and doesn’t touch what EA provides in Burnout. It would be nice to see some licensed stuff tossed into the mix, but maybe that’s something we’ll see in Full Auto 2.
Overall, technical issues aside, Full Auto IS fun to play. It’s also nice to see someone come up with some competition for the Burnout series, which can only lead to better games in the genre. For us game starved 360 owners out there, Full Auto should help ease the drought of original material for the time being, but don’t expect to be blown away.
- Dustin Chadwell currently resides in Ohio, USA. He's been playing video games since the Atari 2600, and believes he can whoop anyone's ass in Joust, and Galaga. Probably not Halo 2 though. New technology tends to confuse him.