Review

A lemon's a lemon, even with glossy paint

By Omar L. Gallaga
American-Statesman Staff
Monday, March 27, 2006

Overview: Crash, bang, blast, bang! That's about the size of "Full Auto," a racing and destruction game in the "Twisted Metal" vein that features next-generation graphics, but not much else. Take the recent "Burnout" series, take away some of its more innovative features, and add hood- and trunk-mounted guns. Voila! Instant Xbox 360 title.

Modes: Very lengthy single-player career mode, online play, split-screen head-to-head mode, several arcade play modes.

Game play: "Full Auto" is too much of a good thing. It mixes the wanton destruction of "Burnout" with some very nice environments that you might find in a more arcade-flavored racing game like "Ridge Racer." The problem is that the racing itself is not that compelling (and it can very difficult on some of the twisty tracks that require full 180 turns in some areas) and the destruction, while incredibly fun at first, gets pretty old pretty fast.

The game features a fair number of different vehicles, but the choice of weapons to mount on the car is limited to missiles, machine guns and shotguns as well as rear-mounted mines, rockets or smoke. With a game like this, where reality is secondary to pulse-pounding action, more extreme weapons (think the arsenal from any "Doom" game) would have made "Full Auto" a deeper gameplay experience.

Handling on the cars is fine and the graphics seem fantastic at first. But, especially in career mode, the gameplay gets monotonous. You try to win races, hoping to place in first, second or third to collect medals for each event. On your way, you can use your weapons to slow down or destroy other cars. Those "Burnout"-like takedowns happen in glorious slow motion. However, when the action gets intense, the game itself suffers from unintended slowdown that's more technical than aesthetic.

The game, like many action titles, is more fun in multiplayer. Having real-life opponents, in your living room or online, makes the game a trash-talking experience. Otherwise, "Full Auto" fails to live up to other great racing titles already on the Xbox 360.

Technical Presentation: Very nice graphics and tracks are at first impressive until you realize that there's too little variety to give the game much depth. Menus are crisp and colorful. Sound design is loud and proud. Environments are semi-destructible, but the thrill doesn't last long. Music is uninspiring.

Ease of Use: "Full Auto" is one of the easier titles to play. It's a pick-up-and-play shooter/racer. But winning races with aggressive opponents becomes tough fairly quickly. Xbox 360 achievement points are fairly easy to score in career mode, but you may get bored before collecting them all.

Nice Surprise: An "Unwreck" option, which lets you rewind the action to redo a crash is a nice feature: Instead of losing a race, you can just step back in time, avoid that land mine, and continue like it never happened.

Enraging Quirk: In career mode you'll play the same few tracks over and over until you're pretty sick of them.

Bottom Line: It's nice to see a title on the 360 console that isn't a sequel or port, but Sega's "Full Auto" feels like a fresh coat of paint slapped on an older-generation title. It's a decent rental, but not one of the Xbox 360's more compelling games. Maybe in a sequel or two, "Full Auto" will come close to matching more established franchises like "Project Gotham Racing," "Twisted Metal" and the head of the class, "Burnout: Revenge."