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| | Title:
Full Auto
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System:
Xbox 360
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Genre:
Action
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Publisher:
Sega Corporation
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Developer:
Pseudo Interactive
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Release:
February 21, 2006
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Online:
Yes
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ESRB:
Teen (T)
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Recently, here at Xbox Core, we got our hands on a demo of Full Auto for Xbox 360. After playing it through numerous times we have a much better idea about how the game handles and what experience Full Auto is trying to give gamers.
As the demo started we were given the choice of choosing between two cars. Exteriorly they really don't offer up much difference. The best way to describe them would be muscle cars from the 70’s with machine guns strapped to the hood (which should excite a lot of Vigilante Eight fans). Once a car was chosen there was only one track to try out. When racing the cars handle in a very arcade like style. Full Auto is not going for any sense of realism when it comes to their vehicles. The cars handle incredibly well and it took awhile to get used to not having to apply the brake while going around sharp turns. It is actually a step beyond the handling of the Burnout series. In Burnout the cars handled well but still required some amount of skill to get them through the race with success. In Full Auto it seems like just steering the car in the right direction will yield good results. Whether or not this will dilute the whole experience is unknown yet. It is understandable though that the car handling was simplified because of the reintroduction of hood mounted weapons.
Only two weapons were available for use during the demo. The cars used came standard with a pair of hood mounted machine guns. These machine guns are like the default weapons that come with every vehicle (again a nod to Vigilante Eight). Unlike Vigilante Eight, these machine guns are quite effective against opponents. They wear down your car's life bar fairly quickly. Each car has four regions of health. Should one of them be reduced to zero your car explodes. This does not result in elimination from the race, it just slows you down. In addition to machine guns, players can acquire other weapons on the race track. The weapon in the demo was a rocket launcher. There was no homing feature on this weapon so leading the shots was required. Blowing an opponent out of the sky is incredibly satisfying. The game slows, zooms in on the unfortunate victim and then whips you right back into the action. Burnout is the king of this transition but it looks to have a worthy apprentice in Full Auto.
In addition to using weapons, players also have two other abilities they can use to their advantage while racing. Represented by two bars on either side of the screen, players can use the boost (found on the right) or the uncrash (found on the left). The boost honestly did not seem to make that much of a difference during the race. The boost could only be used when the bar was completely full and gave about four seconds of use max. When boosting I never caught up significantly with another racer and I quickly found myself not using it in favor of my weapons. The other feature uncrash is still up in the air on how effective it is. On the one hand the act of rewinding time and witnessing a crash in reverse is spectacular. On the other hand, some crashes are so bad that no player is going to be able to get out of it. This happened to me several times as well. No matter if I rewind time or not, my car still flipped or got taken out by an opponent. Luckily, the uncrash bar fills up rather quickly so its use in races will be much more frequent than the boost.
The last thing that needs mentioning is the amazing level of destructibility that the levels offer up. Everything in these tracks can be blown up to a certain degree. Many times my missiles went where I did not intend and I was rewarded with the site of the buildings exploding. The tracks are also littered with stuff to crash into. Thankfully, colliding into this "stuff" does not slow down the car (unlike NFS:MW). This area of the game is where the true power of the 360 becomes apparent. With all the explosions, missiles flying, and cars blasting across the track one would expect the frame rate to drop. It doesn't. Not once.
How Full Auto will end up is hard to say. While of the aspects of this game are amazing (explosions and solid frame rate), others are questionable (boost bar and uncrash). It is too bad that one of the uncertain aspects of the game is also one of ones that are supposed to make Full Auto unique. The best way to describe Full Auto is Burnout meets Vigilante Eight. Only will time will tell if this combination is a success.
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ahnonamis
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