"Half Auto?"

INTRO: Full Auto has been hyped up for a while now, so now that it is finally here is it up to par? In my opinion, no. Originally I was excited about the release, but after playing the demo I was left with a feeling wanting more. But I had learned from past experiences demos are not a very good judgement of a game. So I gave Full Auto one more shot, and here is the final verdict.

GRAPHICS: Full Auto probably has the worst graphics on the 360. It lacks the clarity and color detail I have come to know from the launch games. There are some great particle effects though. When you crash into something or cause overall mayhem it looks cool. But it still doesn't look next gen or measure to it's competion. The backgrounds and tracks are completely forgettable, it seems the creators knew that everything would be blown up so they decided not to even try to make stuff look good while not on fire. And don't even mention the car models, completely generic and uninspired.
Score: 3

SOUND: Not bad but not impressive, the cars sound all right as do all the explosions. The music is mostly techno which kinda makes sense? My only real complaint here is that the tracks skip a lot especially in the loads.
Score 5

STORY: None, nada, nothing. That is the story, not even a bland apocalyptic plot that somehow justifies putting a chaingun on a sports car. Yet more proof that little effort was thrown into this game.
Score: 1

CONTROLS: Full auto does feel pretty user friendly, which is huge in any sort of racing game. The only problem a occurs when trying to aim some of the weapons, You use the other joystick while your trying to maneuver through traffic and make a precise shot. An intelligent auto aim would have gone far in this game.
Score: 7

GAMEPLAY: The part that really counts about any game is how fun is it to play? Well, Full Auto has been marketed as a no holds barred destroy everything combat racer with a reverse time feature. A fairly cool sounding idea for a game but it falls short because the actual gameplay does not focus on what's cool about this game. When you get this game your probably going to want blow everything up but you will find your self instead in a race where the combat takes a back seat. Finishing first is the bottom line, and often times you don't have to destroy the environment or make that well placed shot to kill your opponent. And as far as the time reverse part goes, most of the time its useless because you will either duplicate your same mistake or create a new one. To make matters worse the AI will often do cheap stuff like take you out right on the home stretch or magically be passing you after you bumped into the traffic even you know they were just half the track distance behind you. The online isn't anything to get excited about either, same thing only it's people making the cheap moves on you instead.
Score: 5

BOTTOM LINE: Full Auto feels like game rushed out to fill the void where the 360 waits for its second big game release push. If want to try something new on your 360 then Full Auto isn't that bad of rental, but just don't buy it because of the hype till you rent though.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/12/06