"Fast and exciting car combat, but not perfect,"

Full auto is a great car combat game. However, you must remember it is not a racing game; it's a car combat game. While it does incorporate racing into the game, and quite well I might add, it is at its heart a fast paced adrenaline charged machine gun powered action game. If your looking for deep and complex racing, this isn't your game.

The game play in Full Auto is solid. In almost all the game types you are either racing for 1st place or on a time limit. In many you are also tasked with destroying other racers, creating general destruction, and overall just firing unnecessary amounts of ammunition into anything moving or not. The racing is solid, the sense of speed is pretty good and the vehicles control relatively well. Sometimes the vehicles do feel a little to “arcade-like” but overall they are fun and varied, with different vehicles excelling with different play styles. The weapons in the game are awesome, from roof mounted tank cannons, to homing missiles. There is a pretty good variety of weapons and they all cause a satisfying amount of destruction. Overall, the game play is simple yet fun. It's easy to pick up, yet hard to master.

The single player game is pretty good. There are a large number of events, with varied objectives and increasing challenge. Additionally, you have the ability to rewind time, to try again at dispatching another racer, making a jump, or avoiding death. The second chance feature is only available in single player, and it's a lot of fun. It also helps eliminate one of the problems of car combat games, if you where in first place the entire race and got hit by a lucky shot destroying and moving you to last place 100 yards from the finish line you'd be ticked. Now you can rewind and dodge the rocket you know is coming your way to get the gold. I really enjoyed the rewind feature; it's a lot of fun.

The multi player is really where this game shines; it's all the fun fast car combat racing from single player. With a very cohesive ranking system, fast matching system, and good lag free net code. After 10 or so games you will consistently get placed with players of similar skill, and the games are fast and fun. Plus, you get ranking points not only for finishing in the top 4, but also for destroying other players. This really helps the game, as even if you're not the fastest you can wreak havoc on those who are with your weapons and still get some points contributed to your rank. Additionally, there is a good built in match browser, so you can find just the game you want, and there are plenty of options to customize, from car class, weapons, over 20 tracks, and type of event.

The graphics are really great; the cars have an amazing amount of detail, as do the weapons and tracks. There are also lots of great looking explosions, complete with heat distortion, and lots of other fancy effect to be seen. As the game advertises no longer is everything scripted, the world is all governed by physics and this really makes things feel alive. From literally hundreds of items flying through the air as you drive through a street market to the way your opponents fly after getting a tank shell up the tailpipe it all looks awesome. However, not all is perfect here. The game can have some frame rate drops, during actual game play this happens very rarely, but it seems to happen consistently when you enter the instant replay mode. Not to be confused with the time rewind feature, the instant replay lets you watch a crash, execution, or jump again at any time during game play at the touch of a button. When you go in it all works great, but when you leave the instant replay screen to return to the race there is always a few seconds stutter to get things back on track. It doesn't really hinder the game, and only happens seems to happen on 360's without a HD, as when I attached my HD it no longer happened. I suspect the game might take advantage of the HD to cache your actions rather than doing it in ram, this would free up more memory and eliminate hiccups. Either way, in the graphics department Full Auto is everything you could want and more.

The sounds in Full Auto are just what you would expect, lots of explosions, some acceptable music, and great sounding weapons fire and cars. There isn't a lot to say about the audio, it's not special, but it doesn't need to be. It sounds great and gets the job done.

Overall, Full Auto is a great car combat game; it has lots of action and some good racing plus some fun features and awesome multi player. All of those great features are complimented by good looking graphics, and solid audio. Full Auto isn't perfect, and it isn't some masterpiece people will be talking about for years. It's just a good solid car combat game, and that's all it was ever meant to be.

Scores:
Graphics: 9
Sound: 9
Game play: 8
Single Player: 8
Multi player: 9
Overall: 8

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 02/27/06