Full Auto is mostly sheer carnage based combat. You can either focus on winning races, or just blowing up opponents and online over Xbox Live this was a common mistake. People would forget about the race and just cause carnage by destroying the scenery to impede other player’s progress. I was hugely surprised by the amount of destruction that could be caused in the game. On one track a misfired rocket crashed into a giant chimney stack sending it crashing to the ground, just as the first placed car tried to avoid it and ended up exploding horribly into a nearby wall. Every now and again you’ll always be surprised to find various shortcuts that can help you win races, as well as destructible environmental pieces. It would be nice if there was a larger variety of tracks though as there isn’t enough in my opinion.
At the end of the day, you need to appreciate that Full Auto is an arcade/combat racer and not a hardcore sim racer. These cars handle like their wheels are made of oil slick, so they slide around corners instead of gripping the road and turning with some stress like conventional racers.
Vehicles are split up between A, B, C and S classes. The lightest armoured, but fastest cars make up class A. Class C is mainly comprised of heavily armoured but slower vehicles e.g. pickups and tow trucks. Class S has only one car - The Warlord! This thing is a fast, heavily armoured car with top end handling. All in all, there are 21 vehicles to choose from. Every vehicle does drive slightly differently from each other but not to such a large degree. At the end of the day you should be able to drive any of the vehicles without any difficulty.
Visuals/Audio
Full Auto isn’t without its quirks though. Some tracks have random frame rate drops that really do damage your driving and can send you right into the nearest wall/mountain. Luckily you’ve built up your Unwreck meter… The frame rate drops are a classic symptom of a rushed, poorly coded title. The 360 can easily handle all this destruction but SEGA have just rushed this game, and it shows in places.
The damage model on the cars is really good. These vehicles were designed to literally come apart and they do so in some style. As you chew away at your opponents with your weapons, you see bits of body panel, and glass flying all over the place. On occasions you’ll see the driver’s body of your rival racer catapulted out of their cars in hilarious fashion.
Adding to the immense chaos is the loud sound effects. They definitely give you a sense of mass destruction as you storm through environments laying waste to your surroundings. Full Auto has what can only be described as a thumping Electro Rock soundtrack that plays away in the background but this is quickly ignored over the sound effects.
So we’ve got a racer that has mediocre graphics, and sound but a great engine that handles destruction really well. However the game just doesn’t move fast enough to feel like a full blown racer. Despite the multitude of particle effects and debris flying everywhere to solidify Full Auto’s sense of destructive chaos, the game just isn’t fast paced enough. If you were to put Full Auto alongside Burnout Revenge, it would look like the cars are going through a slow time bubble. Burnout Revenge is the fastest racer I’ve ever set eyes on - so fast that at various times I couldn’t process everything that was going on around me. Burnout Revenge is Mad Max with Nitrous, Full Auto is Mario Kart with toy weapons if you get my drift.