Full Auto 2: Battlelines
Pseudo Interactive's second go at car combat is better, but far from perfect.
Published: December 29, 2006
Things like reworked tracks from the first game, now rife with interactivity and peppered with new shortcuts and side alleys, suffer at the hand of an overzealous sense of speed and handling on cars that, even when rated as having near-perfect handling, feel like land boats. The merger of the boost and unwreck (the ability to rewind time for a few seconds, Prince of Persia-style) into one single meter is meant to balance the two and in all honesty it does a good job at that. Miss a turn and you can either boost through the longer section or unwreck to try it again.
A greater casualty is the improved level of environmental interaction. Yes, stuff blows up and breaks real good, but Pseudo actually spent time in littering familiar tracks with specific environmental "traps" that can be laid with a carefully placed shot. Why spend time lighting up a truck's backside when you can just drop a shipping crate on them? Hell, roll an entire boat over a handful of opponents if you'd like. Finding all the little bits that were added to change the levels on a lap-by-lap basis is half the fun of exploring the game.
What isn't fun is the way the AI rides your ass mercilessly and forces you to concentrate on combat rather than learning these new little toys. Just a few missions into the game, the difficulty spikes so high it'll likely turn newcomers off completely, and it never really drops low enough to re-establish the initial sense of "oh, hey, this could be pretty damn fun." The inclusion of new arena-style battles push the whole racer/car combat balance more toward the latter, but they lack the punch of stuff like Twisted Metal and exacerbate the issue with the AI where they just seem to gang up on you rather than going after everyone.
Oh, and the other source of that rage? Two words: escort missions.
And then there's the online play. I've had a copy of Full Auto 2 now for almost a month and I haven't been able to play a single game online. For a few weeks, I was apparently the number-one ranked player without ever playing a game. I'm sure this was just how GameSpy was reporting the stats, but still. To this day, I've never been able to get a game going with anyone, ranked or unranked, due to either nobody being on or not enough people getting into a match. It's a shame, because it's entirely possible the single-player faults could be fixed with some actual human opponents.
Arrrrg, still angry. I know Pseudo is close, and it's clear that they have the technical prowess to make a pretty game. It's just in major things like balance and creating a game that is clearly defined that they seem to be having issues. If by chance a third Full Auto is made, I've no doubt they'll be able to rectify some of the issues with the first two games, but to do it, they should probably start over from square one and make a game that is a little more concise. What's there now is a good start, but it's not quite a proper game yet.
