Full Auto Review

Features and Modes

Full Auto has several modes and tons of races to complete so you’ll have plenty to do. Even though the gameplay gets pretty repetitive it is worth tearing through all of these modes just to unlock everything for multiplayer. Also, the achievements you can earn are ridiculously easy to get so you can add some easy points to your gamercard. The main single player mode is the Career mode which features dozens of races you can play through. Some races have special rules such as no weapons or no Unwreck which makes things a little more interesting than they would have been otherwise. There is also an arcade mode, but it is pretty much like Career mode minus all of the unlockables.

Multiplayer either in splitscreen or on Xbox Live is really where the gameplay in Full Auto is at, however. The game is still pretty repetitive, but the added benefit of talking trash and trading machine gun fire with real people makes the experience pretty enjoyable. The game runs smoothly online and finding a game through the quick and custom game searches is fast and easy.

Graphics and Sound

Graphically, Full Auto doesn’t disappoint. The sheer amount of junk flying around the screen during a race is undeniably impressive. All of the cars and buildings – pretty much everything you can see – can be damaged and it is pretty interesting to see how the track changes from lap to lap. There are some hitches in the frame rate every now and then, but for the most part Full Auto runs smoothly.

The sound, on the other hand, isn’t all that hot. Each aspect sounds fine on its own, but listening to a whole race of constant monotonous engine noises and nonstop machine gun fire gets old fast. The soundtrack is made up of generic rock that adds very little to the experience. You can use custom soundtracks to solve this problem, but whenever the game loads it jumps back to the in-game soundtrack so you’ll have to restart your music in every single race.

Bottom Line

Full Auto isn’t really a bad game, but it is far from great. The gameplay lacks depth and the truth is that shooting stuff while driving has been done better elsewhere. Also, the lack of a straight up battle mode where you forget the racing and instead just shoot each other in a big open arena leaves a pretty big hole in the feature list. Multiplayer is more fun than single player, but there just isn’t enough meat here to justify a purchase. The final version is actually quite a bit better than the demo that was released a few weeks ago, so don’t completely write off the game based on what you thought of the demo. Is it worth $60? I would say no. It is a solid rental and when the price drops to about $30 or less I would say buy it, but not yet. Xbox 360 fans, this isn’t the game you were looking for. Move along.