  Keeping auto mechanics and pesky insurance adjusters busy in 'Full Auto'. |
Full Auto marks the second time Toronto-based Pseudo Interactive has delivered a car combat game near the launch of a Microsoft console, with 2001's cartoony Cel Damage for the Xbox showcasing slick visuals but very little depth.
At first glance, Full Auto, due in stores later this week, might seem to suffer the same fate. It's pretty to look at, with incredibly detailed environments and cars, but there's little in the way of storyline or structure.
But does it matter? Hell no. This is pure, unadulterated four-wheeled destruction on an epic scale, and I haven't had this much fun playing a racing game in ages.
The game is as pick-up-and-play as they come, allowing you to get behind the wheel of a variety of vehicles outfitted with weapons ranging from missiles and machine guns to smokescreens and mines, then take to the street (or the countryside) to wreak total mayhem.
Full Auto's pair of killer features are its destructible environments -- with only a few exceptions, if you can see it, you can smash it -- and it's "unwreck" feature, which allows you to rewind time, Prince Of Persia-style, to take another stab at hitting a jump or making a corner or avoiding the missile that a foe just launched up your tailpipe.
This eases a lot of the typical crash-and-restart frustration found in racing games, and since most Full Auto races are frenzies of nonstop destruction, unwreck will soon become your best friend.
The single-player campaign has a whopping 17 chapters of three to six races apiece, ranging from straight run-and-gun circuit races to time trials, lap attacks, hunter missions and the dreaded one-life (and no unwreck) "Impossibles."
And the level of destruction in Full Auto absolutely eclipses even the awesome Burnout series. While the game doesn't have a full race replay feature, you can play back the last 10 or 15 seconds of action at any time, pausing, rewinding and adjusting the camera angle to savour the absolute mayhem unfolding around your car.
In one race, the flaming wreck of a just-smited foe landed on a ramp that I was turbo-boosting into, changing the angle of my jump and shooting my Plymouth Prowler-like car into the stratosphere. Oops!
I clipped a rooftop billboard, slid off the edge of a four-storey building, spiralled back to the street and by the grace of Zeus landed on all four wheels, all while my enemies' missiles and grenades were chewing chunks out of the surrounding building facades, bus shelters and parked cars, sending shrapnel and sparks flying every which way.
Then I triggered my hood-mounted shotgun to take out the sucker I wound up directly behind, and his careening wreck smashed through the plate glass windows of a car dealership. I must have rewatched that reply half a dozen times over.
Multiplayer is good fun as well, though a wider variety of game types, like maybe arena battles or a capture-the-flag variant, would have been welcome. You also can't unwreck during multiplayer games, though that's not surprising.
I have a feeling Full Auto is going to be a love-it-or-hate-it title. Because it lacks the structure and polish of, say, Burnout Revenge, and because the framerates sometimes chug, it's going to be too simple and sluggish for some.
Plus, it would have been nice to see a wider selection of weapons, a few more environments and some sort of storyline with a logical progression and maybe even boss battles. And the lack of some way to save your mini-replays is almost criminal, given how cinematically awesome they are.
Still, if you can overlook the somewhat significant shortcomings, Full Auto is an amazing-looking technical feat, and more often than not a ridiculous amount of fun to play.
BOTTOM LINE
While the game could have been truly exceptional with a few additions and more polish, it's still addictively fun and frantic.
WHAM! Rating: |
8 out of 10 |
ESRB Rating: |
T (Teen) |
Official Web Site: |
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