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Full Auto Review for Xbox 360 |
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| Monday, March 13, 2006 |
| | 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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First, let me get a few things out of the way. Full Auto is not a car combat game. Full Auto is not a pure racing game. Instead, it is a combative racing game. What this means is that you won’t drive around—ala Twisted Metal and Rogue Trip—and blow up your opponents to win. You also won’t just drive through a city and win a race. To win in Full Auto, you’ll have to learn how to drive and blow up your enemies simultaneously. With that in mind, it sounds like it would be hard to go wrong, right? Well, you’d be surprised.
Gameplay
There are several modes available in Full Auto. There’s a single player Career Mode, Head-to-Head (split screen), Xbox Live, and Arcade Mode. Career Mode is where you’ll spend most of your time playing this game offline, since the Arcade Mode gets boring quickly, and outside of gaining achievements is completely pointless.
In the Career Mode, you’ll find yourself first in a tutorial, which is probably one of the better tutorial modes I’ve seen in recent games. After you’ve learned the rules of the road, you’re ready. Sadly, it’s all downhill from there.
Unlike simulation racers like Gran Turismo, in Full Auto your “career” consists of completing a set of challenges which gradually increase in difficulty. When you complete one, you’ll be awarded with medals ranging from bronze to gold depending on how you’ve finished. It’s through playing the Career Mode that you’ll unlock new cars, paint and tracks, so if you really want to get the most out of Full Auto you should probably make completing it one of your first priorities.
Unfortunately, the Career Mode gets boring fast. You would think that because of the increase in difficulty and the premise of the game in general it would be hard to put the game down, right? Wrong. After the first few missions, you’ll realize that a majority of them are the same objectives and encounters you saw in earlier challenges. Does it take away from the gameplay? Slightly. More importantly, it takes away the drive to keep going in Career Mode, since you’ll rarely see something new or experience something unique after the first hour or so.
Besides the Career Mode, you’ll probably spend most of your time playing multiplayer. If you don’t have Xbox Live (or just want to play with some friends) Head-to-Head is where you’ll be. Sadly, we experienced frequent drops in framerate while playing Head-to-Head, even when there weren’t a lot of explosions occurring. Does it make it unplayable? No. But it causes the races to be extremely frustrating, and I can recall several occasions where it was a close race (I’m talking photo finish), and a large drop in the framerate near the finish line caused a fluke crash or missed shot, allowing someone else to win.
Thankfully, on Xbox Live it doesn’t seem to happen at all (at least in my experience). If you play on Xbox Live, you can expect all of the standard features such as a leaderboard…but that’s basically it. It doesn’t have a special feature which makes it unique, and there’s no mode of gameplay you can find exclusively online. Because of the framerate issues in Head-to-Head, playing on Xbox Live is really the only way to play a multiplayer race in Full Auto without suffering large amounts of slowdown.
No matter which mode you play, the basic concept is the same. You’ll pick your car, and then choose which weapons to equip. Each car has three statistics which make them different from each other: durability, handling, and speed. (Sadly, despite differing statistics most cars handle the same, and the only real difference you can see is how many shots they can absorb). Weapons come in pairs of a front and rear weapon to help make the game more balanced. Although, once you begin to unlock the more powerful weapons via Career Mode, those are the only viable ones you can use if you want to win a race.
From there, it’s what you would expect in a combat racing game. You race, and you shoot things. The game boasts a fully destructible environment, which is amazing. Sadly, if you want to actually win the races, you’ll have little time to drive around shooting obscure buildings. Adding a mode focusing on who could cause the most destruction would have been a nice change of pace.
The other unique feature mentioned in conjunction with this game is the “Unwreck” ability. This ability allows a racer who has a sufficient amount of meter built up to rewind time, thereby “missing” a wreck. It’s a neat feature, and at times can really help. Unfortunately, once you’ve played the game more than a few minutes you’ll rarely be in a wreck big enough where Unwreck would actually be useful to use, and it instead becomes more of an “all frills” feature.
Graphics
Compared to some newer 360 games, Full Auto pales in comparison. Are the graphics horrible? No. Are they great? No. They fall somewhere in the middle, and with a Sega arcade racing game, that’s what you would expect.
While there are no licensed cars, the ones in Full Auto do certainly represent actual brands, so anyone with a limited knowledge of automobiles will be able to recognize some of the vehicles and link them to their real life counterpart. Of course, most of the ones which do resemble real brands seemed to be older or obscure models, making it slightly difficult.
What Pseudo Interactive did best when it comes to the graphics is the environment. As mentioned earlier, it is completely destructible. The explosions look great, the buildings look good when they fall and crashes look awesome. If only more of an emphasis were placed on destroying the environment, which would have made the graphics even better. As it is, the most amazing visual aspect of the game is the one most rarely seen while in a race.
Audio
Let me say one thing about Full Auto’s soundtrack: if the media center didn’t allow you to play your own music, I would probably play this game on mute with my CD player turned on. The music is that annoying and bland. In fact, the choice is so poor it almost seems like Pseudo and Sega decided they would pick random songs and let the gamers’ pick which music they wanted to play from their own 360 harddrive.
The sound effects, however, are done pretty well. They aren’t amazingly realistic, and they won’t shake your subwoofers. But, in a game like Full Auto is, they fit in well and really add to the experience.
Overall
Overall, Full Auto is a throwback to old-school arcade racing which attempts to add some new elements to the mix. The idea itself is a good one, but the game doesn’t quite capitalize on it. The lack of variety in modes, and the lack of unique gameplay elements hamper Full Auto, and make it hard to really get into.
For the first hour or so, it will be a game which you’ll swear is going to end up being great. Sadly, after that first hour you’ve seen pretty much everything Full Auto has to offer. If it were in an arcade, it would be perfect. For $60 and on a home console, however, the lack of replayability really hurts the game, and makes it hard for me to recommend buying it.
In the end, if you like arcade racers you may want to give this game a rent and see if you want to play it more than a week. Otherwise, there are plenty of other racing games on the Xbox 360, and as of this date, all of them are better than Full Auto.
| The Core Score |
Overall
6.8 |
| Fun |
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7 |
| Gameplay |
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7 |
| Graphics |
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6.3 |
| Audio |
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7.5 |
| Replay |
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6.5 |
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