X05: Full Auto Hands-On

AMSTERDAM--Sega is exhibiting a new version of Full Auto--its destructive "Burnout meets Twisted Metal"-style racing game--at Microsoft's X05 event, and we got behind the wheel to see how development is progressing. The game is looking more complete than when we've seen it in the past, and it looks like it should provide a solid thrill ride that's light on technique but heavy on blowing stuff up.

The demo version of Full Auto put us in a simple street race with a choice of two muscle cars, and the biggest difference between the two seemed to be their respective armament. The vulcan came packing a straightforward machine gun and rocket launcher, while the python was equipped with a shotgun and bomb layer that dropped explosives behind itself. The two cars seemed to handle more or less the same--perhaps choosing different cars in the final game will come down to which weapons you prefer to use. In general terms, the driving control in Full Auto is arcade-style and forgiving to the extreme--you can easily drift around tight corners at near top speed, and it's easy to recover from most mistakes without being heavily penalized by the laws of physics.

Then again, it'll be even easier to fix your mistakes using Full Auto's unwreck feature, which lets you rewind the last few seconds of the action for another try. We were able to put unwreck to good use in a number of situations, such as when we hit our boost too late to hit a ramp and make a particularly grandiose jump. You can even use unwreck to save your tail if you get blown up by an opponent--just hit the unwreck button even after your car is a smoldering wreck, and you'll get another chance to avoid the offending rocket or bullets, or even to pay back whoever killed you the first time.

Coming in first is paramount in Full Auto, but it's almost as important to cause as much damage as you can, since the game keeps track with a numerical score of how much you've destroyed. Practically everything short of the buildings themselves can be smashed, shot, or driven through--and you can even trash the foundations of some buildings with heavy munitions. The game even provides secondary win conditions based on your destruction score, such as requiring you to come in at least in second place and with a certain number of points to achieve a second-tier ranking for that particular race. It looks like there will be a lot of incentive to go back to previous levels and try for a better ranking, which should give you obsessive types extra replay value to chew on.

Full Auto is coming along nicely from what we played this evening, and though the game isn't going to be out in time for the Xbox 360's launch, the extra development time should give Pseudo a chance to polish it into something special. The game's already busier than most action games we've seen, with every phone booth and Starbucks in sight being reduced to flying debris, so we look forward to seeing how much more Full Auto will improve. We'll have more details on the game as soon as they become available.