May 17, 2005 - It's not a stretch to assume that speed and guns is a formula that sounds like it would appeal to almost any gamer, but it all depends on how well those elements are put together. While next-gen graphics and eye candy are already set to impress and astound, we have a discerning eye focused on how companies are going to wow us with their next-generation gameplay. With only one day left to go before E3 "officially" opens, we don't have long to wait to play all the next-gen games and see how the developers are doing. But being the lucky little devils we are, we had a chance to play Sega's Full Auto on Xenon development hardware before E3, and what follows is our impressions of the balls-to-the-wall combat racing title.

Full Auto is being developed by Toronto-based Pseudo Interactive. If that name sounds familiar to you, it may be because they were the minds behind another car combat title -- Cel Damage -- a few years ago, as well as the little-known PC version of Full Auto way back in 1999. However, with the exception of weapon-strapped cars, their next-gen project bears little resemblance to their earlier games. More relevant to their next-gen expertise is the fact that they were the team called on by Microsoft to create the impressive Crash demo shown at GDC last year. Remember the one with realistic physics, dynamic model crumpling, breaking glass, flying tires and loads of particle effects? Yeah, that one. Although the Crash demo was very brief, that's not a bad base to build off of for a combat racing title.

Full Auto reminds us a lot of Burnout 3 with guns and massive, fiery explosions. Like most racing games, your main goal is to cross the finish line first. Sounds easy enough, right? But in Full Auto the real challenge may be crossing the finish line at all. With guns blazing, missiles flying and plenty of environmental objects like telephone poles and buildings to wrap your car around, sometimes getting to the end of a race isn't as easy as it sounds.

Full Auto is all about mass obliteration, and although you may not have time in the middle of a race to stop and fire a salvo of missiles at that taco stand at the end of the street, you can literally take out entire city blocks building by building if you wish. It may be a nihilistic outlook on life, but every object in the game is built to be destroyed, and all destruction happens in real-time with no scripting. To help you in your quest to blow the crap out of everything in site, you can outfit your car with an impressive loadout of weapons, including machine guns, side-firing shotguns, mines, missiles and grenade launchers. And to keep the destruction continuous, there is no ammo limit to worry about, although your weapons can overheat, causing them to not fire for a few seconds.

In addition to your own cache of auto-destroying weapons, one unique feature that Full Auto gives you to avoid becoming a flattened pancake or crumpled accordion on the course is the "unwreck" feature. By holding down the Y button, you can rewind the last few seconds of action (depending on how much time you have on your unwreck meter), effectively saving your *** if you get in a predicament that you can't pull out of through normal means. However, the unwreck feature must be used before you crash completely and bring the race to an end, so don't be shy about using it before the $#!% hits the fan. It saved me on more than one occasion after I had lost control going around a curve, got caught up on a building corner allowing everyone to pass me or hit a jump and landed in an awkward position.

To encourage you to cause as much destruction, mayhem and havoc as possible, your unwreck meter slowly fills every time you destroy something. Luckily, Pseudo Interactive has designed the levels with devastation in mind, and there are plenty of gas mains, propane tanks and petrol stations lining the raceways to literally fuel the ruination of the city.

Hitting these "hot spots" often creates a domino effect of destruction. A great example of this that I actually caused while playing was barreling down on a parked tanker truck with my guns blazing. After a few hits, the tanker burst into flame and sped toward a huge propane tank, which in turn caught fire and shot into the air, landing in the middle of a gas station. You can pretty much fill in the blanks in your mind for what happened next. Firestarter!

Every building, every newspaper stand, every car, every tanker truck and every light post can be destroyed, and instead of just crumbling, throwing up dust and disappearing into the ground, these objects react and behave like you would expect them to react if you shot them with a .20 caliber machine gun or blasted them with explosive missiles. Glass, stone, wood and other materials all react like they would in the real world, and the destruction in Full Auto is simultaneously horrifically extensive and delightfully beautiful.

Even at this early stage in development, the blasts and destruction look fantastic, all with no slow-down apparent. What impressed me the most was the shear amount of debris flying around the screen at once in the middle of an intense race. The screen is literally filled with debris, fire, sparks, splinters, glass and chunks of metal, yet you never lose the sense of speed which is so important to racing games. Destruction isn't just for visual flare, though. Not only can you set up scenarios to take out your opponents by setting off domino-chain destruction event, but, similar to Burnout, you will receive a property damage score based on the total dollar amount of damage you caused.

Destruction is fine and dandy, but all racing games need to maintain a sense of intense speed, and Full Auto didn't let us down during our playtest. As with any racing game, you want to be going as fast as possible at all times. That's where nitro boosts come into play. Although the course I played was a curvy romp through the middle of a city, there were a few straight-aways where I was able to tap the B button, open it up and lay on the boost. Like Burnout, boost juice is limited, but you accrue more from powersliding around curves, and given the number of turns on the course I played, it wasn't difficult to keep the nitro at full, ready to use whenever possible.

Not only was the sense of speed there, everything was playing at a smooth 30 frames per second. Wait, wait...I know what you're thinking: "30 frames per second?!? LAME!" Don't start a frame flame. Since this is a next-gen title, the team at Pseudo is confident that they can get everything running at a smooth 60 frames per second by release, and considering the code we played was still alpha, we're confident as well. The game takes place in the fictional, modern-day city of Staunton, comprised of five different districts, including the ritzy garment district, a dirty industrial zone and a gaudy entertainment district heavy with neon. Although you're ready to get out of the combat racing scene, the Shepherds, Staunton's toughest gang, have basically forced you back into the death race circuit. Nice lads, eh?

Although the races are fairly linear and not free-roaming, there will be plenty of alternate paths and shortcuts to find in each level, some at street level and some on rooftops and through parking garages that are only accessible after you catch some air. During my playtest, I took one jump and my car did a full 360 roll. Unfortunately, I landed on the roof of my car in the middle of a parking deck. A handy tap of the unwreck button took me back a few hundreds yards in front of the ramp, where I tried it again. This time I hit the ramp slightly differently and rotated a bit more in the air, nailing the jump and giving me a slight advantage over my fellow racers as I shot out of the parking deck's second level ahead of them, shooting them "the bird" in my head.

You can expect 20 different playable cars in the final with 10 single-player modes and over 60 events in career mode. In addition, you'll be able to play two to four players on split-screen action or with up to seven others over Xbox Live (or Xbox 360 Live, or whatever Microsoft ends up calling their multiplayer service). Although we didn't get to see it in action, the team also hinted at an arena gameplay mode, and said that the entire office has been playing a lot of San Francisco Rush 2049 recently. The shear mention of what is, in my opinion, one of the most fun N64 action racing games ever made my nipples hard.

As you can imagine, since this is on the Xbox 360, we can expect some tight visuals out of Full Auto. Since it's becoming an industry standard in most modern games, it should come as no surprise that all the cars will be normal mapped and sport several layers nifty effects maps, complete with real-time reflections. Like the Crash demo, the cars will also display some nice crumpling effects as well, although the smushed accordion look is probably not what you want to see on your own car. The game also carries some nice lighting effects, and you'll be able to race in both day and night battles. As good as it appeared while playing, we were told that this is just the early look of the game, and that the final game would look even more polished, glitzy and dy-no-mite than what we were currently seeing.

As if you don't already have enough to play around with, Full Auto will also support some nice customization features. By picking up bits and pieces during races, you can customize your car with various weapons. However, the kind of car and the class that you're in will place some restraint on your choices. And although the game will ship with a full built-in soundtrack, as with every Xbox 360 game, it will support custom soundtracks as well so you can rock out with your Bach out if you wish.

After going through the course a few times, I walked away impressed with what I saw of Full Auto. It's obvious that the team still has a long way to go, but the potential for greatness is there. As far as next-gen titles that we've actually had a chance to get our hands on at this point (and there haven't been many), Full Auto has definitely left us smiling and wanting more (in a good way). While not exactly a "launch" titles, Sega and Pseudo are saying that Full Auto is a "launch window" title, meaning you can expect to play it for yourself soon after the Xbox 360 is released later this year.