XegearZ|Anime.Games Online Source

If there's one thing that the Xbox 360 does well, it's hosting games where you can simply shoot anything and everything. Call of Duty 2 simulates an entire military campaign right in your very own home, and Perfect Dark has the sexy agent Joanna Dark shooting everyone in a Hong Kong booty club. Now you can add Full Auto to the list of exceptional shooting games, as it manages to mix the best elements of racing with the action-packed experience of a FPS.

Although the comparisons seem obvious, Full Auto is not just another Burnout Revenge clone. Sure, both feature unrealistic arcade-driving mechanics where cars can zoom by in heavy traffic at hairsplitting speeds and crash into things without suffering much damage, but while Burnout Revenge places a particular emphasis on crashing into cars, Full Auto's main attraction is the ability to shoot at the cars. Imagine the classic postapocalyptic movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome but without Tina Turner, the stupid plot for oil, and the crappy, beat-up cars.

Games featuring cars with guns, such as Spy Hunter, have been done before, but there hasn't been one in which you can blow up just about anything. Whether it's a car, a truck, a shipping crate, a bridge overpass, or even a building, almost everything in the environment can be destroyed. You can even use your car to cause some ruckus, plowing through traffic or hurling into the support beam of a building, which will cause the entire front facade to collapse onto the street. It's a cathartic experience to aimlessly drive around the city, to explore its every nook and cranny, and to shoot the living daylights out of every animate and inanimate object in sight.

For each successful drive-by on your most hated opponent, the game takes a page from acclaimed Hong Kong action director John Woo by intentionally slowing the action to depict the gruesome wreckage. Burnout Revenge features similar slow-motion replays, but Full Auto's presentation ups the ante by including them for anything that makes your car fly through the air. This unique stage effect looks quite slick, appearing like something out of a Hollywood cop-chase scene.

It's a miracle that Full Auto can handle the hectic John Woo-inspired action moments at all, but the Xbox 360 does a commendable job of keeping a sturdy pace right through the absolute chaos going on. Previous Full Auto builds suffered from frequent slowdown whenever a lot of action occurred on the screen at once, but with the final build, it seems that the developers have worked out most of the kinks and solved most of the framerate problems. Perhaps now, we're actually playing a game worthy of being called "next gen" -- the game runs beautifully at 60fps, superbly illuminating every bit of explosion, bullets, and car wreckages that it has to offer. Sometimes, though, the action gets too out of hand and the slowdown problems resurface to mar the experience. Furthermore, the game does have its fair share of graphical glitches, but they're only apparent when you truly do something weird...like flying into the side of a building headfirst and somehow getting stuck on the middle of the floor. Wow, that's weird.

Destroying stuff not only looks pretty, but also is an integral part of the game. Full Auto is packed full of secrets and shortcuts, and the only way to discover them is to explore every street while tearing everything into pieces. For example, you can actually shave some precious seconds or even minutes off your finish time by crashing your way through the bottom floors of certain buildings. Since the shortcuts are scattered throughout each level, finding them becomes an engrossing experience, especially when you stumble upon them by accident.

Full Auto may be viscerally stimulating and strangely soothing, but the real reason to buy this game is the overwhelming amount of content presented in the game's different modes. Career mode, which boasts 60-plus events, serves as mere window dressing, as several other single-player modes -- namely Rampage, Pursuit, Arena, and Tag -- can occupy you for hours and hours. If you're tired of playing by yourself, you can ask a friend to battle via splitscreen, or meet random Internet strangers on Xbox Live. Bragging rights and inflated egos are also catered to with leaderboards that depict both those who kick ass and those who suck.

Although Full Auto may not reinvent the extreme-racing genre, it does a spectacular job of raising the bar. At first glance, it may appear to be a considerably slower Burnout clone, but upon further inspection, the game is an entirely different beast, breathing new life to a genre that is growing ever stagnant. Despite a few glitches and the occasional framerate problems, Full Auto is simply a blast to play (pun intended).