While we've seen plenty of racing games on the Xbox 360 and plenty of combative games as well, we've yet to see a combination of the two. The system gets its first car-combat game in Full Auto, a racing-while-shooting extravaganza from Sega and Pseudo Interactive. Full Auto has its heart in the right place, but without enough variants on the core theme, you'll run out of gas long before it runs out of objectives.
Unwrecking can fix some of your mistakes, but really, after a while, you probably won't be making so many to begin with.
In Full Auto, you're put behind the wheel of a car with two weapons mounted on it. Most often, that means you'll have one front-firing weapon and one rear weapon that's dropped behind you. As you play through the career mode, you unlock more cars and more weapon configurations. So you'll start with a machine gun up front and mines behind, but you'll eventually get rocket launchers, smoke screens, rear-firing grenades, a shotgun, and so on. You don't individually pick weapons; instead, you pick them in sets of two, and this is how the developers attempt to keep things balanced--though, naturally, the weapon sets you get later in the career mode are more powerful than what you start with.
Your goal in each race is slightly different, but for the most part, you're just going to always want to finish each race in first place. Aside from your own personal driving skill and your weapons, you've got some other tools at your disposal. Sliding out around corners fills a boost meter. When it's full, you can bust out a turbo boost. And you also have an "unwreck" meter that you can use to rewind the action for a few seconds, and then pick up the action a second or two before you made some horrific mistake and correct it. In theory, applying the time-control mechanics found in Blinx, Prince of Persia, or a TiVo to a racing game is a neat idea. But the racing physics are loose enough that you only really make huge mistakes when you're first learning a track. So that limits unwreck's usefulness a bit, because you'll eventually get to a point where you don't really need it.
There are multiple race types and car classes in Full Auto. Different races include the standard lap-based races, point-to-point races, knockout races where the last-place racer on each lap is eliminated, rampage races that fill the track with target cars for you to take out, and down-and-back, where you race to a point, turn around, and race back the other way. In the career mode, you'll take on these events to earn medals and unlock new cars, paint jobs, and new events. The career mode is fairly lengthy, but it's roughly the same action from start to finish. For the most part, you're just racing and shooting the whole time, which isn't nearly as exciting as that might initially sound. More variety, either by giving up more tracks to race on or by concocting more interesting events, would have really helped. You'll unlock just over 20 cars, each with their own ratings in durability, which governs how long your armor lasts when you're getting hit, as well as handling and speed. Naturally, the faster cars also tend to not be able to take as much damage.
