Full Auto first impressions
Picked up Full Auto yesterday. It's a bit like a modern day Roadblasters - lots of wanton destruction while trying to maintain a good racing line. All the action seems to take place in one city, which has a number of different routes, like Ridge Racer. So you'll see traffic-packed areas, as well as quiet back streets, peppered with a fair bit of interesting architecture, including a flame-engulfed church you can drive through.

You get to choose from a number of muscle cars, in lots of different colours, and after a few tutorials you can start choosing which weapon combinations you want too. All the regulars are here: machine gun, missile launcher, mines, that kind of thing. It also has a boosting system like most of these games have these days - charge up by powersliding and jumping, then hold the boost button down for a couple of seconds of extra speed. The main gimmick in the game, however, is the Unwreck feature. This allows you to rewind the action, and is useful if you have a big crash or if you miss an important shot. Results can be varied, though. For example, if you start the unwreck too late, you'll run out of unwreck charge before you rewind to a safe enough point, and you'll have to sit through the crash again as well as swallowing the penalty afterwards.

There's lots of different styles of races: come in first while surviving, destroy a certain number of rivals in a certain time, cause as much destruction as possible... Mixing them up probably helps to keep the game feeling fresh longer, but I'm not sure if the lack of areas will still be noticeable after prolonged playtime. Certainly the time I have put in so far has been fun, with little signs of tedium setting in. Achievements flow fast and furious and the difficulty seems to be quite well balanced.

There are a couple of annoyances, though. The loading is pretty bad for starters. Perhaps this is mainly because the menu system is so stylish, but the most annoying load time is when you want to retry a race and it reloads the entire thing into memory. Also the framerate is a little jumpy. I guess there is some unintentional slowdown scattered in amongst intentional slowdown, which makes it a little less obvious, but it's still there.

Before calling it a night, I took it online and found out there is quite a skilled community already as I quickly got relegated into last place for the entire match. There appears to be quite a lot of shortcuts in the various parts of the course, so it might be a good idea to explore the city at a leisurely pace in some of the earlier missions. I don't think there's a free roaming mode, but it would have been a welcome addition. I'll put a bit more time into the game before making my mind up fully, but so far it's been lots of fun.