By Dmitri Salcedo on February 27th, 2006

Developed by Pseudo Interactive and published by Sega, Full Auto for the Xbox 360 piqued gamer interest at E3 as one of the few 360 titles shown there, and it also scored plenty of humor points with its hilarious web site. Yet on the game’s first spin out of the packaging, to be honest, it makes a disappointing first impression. At the very beginning of the game, there is not much content that is unlocked yet; you have only a couple of older-model cars and some visually drab tracks to explore at first. As you play a few games while trying to come to grips with the way the combat works, you may wonder, "Is this all there is?" Many might be tempted to write off the game earlier on and move on to something else, but doing so would be premature. Full Auto has a lot more to offer than is initially obvious, as those sticking with the game a bit longer soon discover. When more modes, tracks, and cars are unlocked, the game really shows what it is capable of.

Most people checking out Full Auto’s combat-racing game play will instantly think, "Burnout with guns," yet in practice, Full Auto’s particular balance of combat and racing makes for a very different experience. Burnout’s weapon-free combat involved deft shoves and skillful bumps to run your opponent off the track, while you had to also balance the risk of such moves with concern for your own car’s safety. Basically, your driving skill was the primary weapon. This exists to some extent in Full Auto, but why bother with nuanced nudges when you can blow them off the track with a bazooka?

The controls in the game also feel very different than many other racers, as they seem more "floaty" and forgiving of mistimed turns. This was likely to allow players to focus more on putting a shotgun blast through their neighbor’s window rather than worrying about the upcoming hairpin. The ultimate measure of the game’s forgiveness of errant racing is the novel Unwreck feature, which allows the rewinding of time to undo many mistakes. All of these features guide the player to prioritize combat above all else, and not surprisingly,

While the game is very combat-oriented, there is still a lot of strategy to consider as you careen around the course. A big part of it is the management of your two different meters: the Boost meter and the Unwreck meter. The Boost meter only fills up after drifting turns and the performance of "stunts" such as jumping off a ramp; if you don’t take risks, you don’t get your burst of speed. As many slower cars don’t stand a chance of winning a race without well-timed Boosts and weakened cars can use it to get out of firefights, it gives you another great motivator to drive like a lunatic.

Likewise, the Unwreck meter encourages recklessness by letting you undo many of your mistakes from all the crazy driving, whether you ended up falling off a cliff or exploding in a fireball. The meter only fills when you mix it up with other cars, so you don’t get this power for free. It takes some getting used to, but as you play more of Full Auto you start seeing other subtle uses for the power. Rather than just undoing the catastrophes, you can also redo an errant missile launch or take a turn at slightly different angle, leading the player to make some interesting snap decisions on whether something is worth undoing or not. While it’s a great experiment, Unwreck sometimes seems like it lends too much of a safety cushion for sloppy play. Some of the excitement of success or failure is dulled when the latter is often erased at will, and it’s also jarring to the driver/vehicle bond when one can "snap out" of the race so easily.

The cars in the game are a motley mix of unbranded late and classic-style cars, along with some strange inclusions such as limousines, tow trucks, and snow plows, as if B.A. Baracus himself was let loose on the state motor pool. I’d pity the fool that took a stock SUV into this battle zone, but at least here they have front-mounted machine-guns. While the look of each car certainly has personality, the in-game differences between them are often minimal. You have your clunky durable cars and your brittle racers, some perhaps a bit better off-road than others, with other unimportant shades in-between. The fact that weapon packages are interchangeable cements the choice of a car as mostly cosmetic.

Amongst the weapon packages, you have rather standard entries like the machine gun offset by the good stuff like rocket launchers. Most packages include a rear-mounted weapon that you can use to pick off the cars behind you, but their effectiveness is limited, especially against the computer. The game’s selection of tracks is also a mixed bag, ranging from the dull to the beautiful, each with their own amount of emphasis on either fighting or racing. Again, it turns out that the combat-slanted ones are the most fun to actually play in.

Many are probably wondering: just how "next-gen" is Full Auto? While it comes at a next-gen price, does it deliver the graphical goods? The lighting model certainly is nice, with great-looking reflections off the pavement and other parts of the environment. Aside from that, there’s not really much that stands out graphically as particularly next-generation. However, there are some other great technical achievements of this engine that probably couldn’t be done on older

While the split-screen multiplayer feature is passable, the element of surprise just isn’t there for obvious reasons, as you know when your opponent is reloading or weakened. Where the multiplayer really shines is online on Xbox Live, where your much more capable human opponents put the game’s AI cars to shame as you can’t take any kill for granted. It’s also, thankfully, lag-free.

If you’re looking for a car combat game that is light on the racing but big on the bullets and explosions, Full Auto is your game, especially after you stick around through the tepid beginning and unlock more of what it has to offer. If you’re searching for the next Burnout clone or more conventional racing, keep looking; Full Auto is a separate beast that carves out its own niche in the racing game landscape.