Full Auto 2: Battlelines Feature Preview

We've been getting quick looks at Sega's upcoming Full Auto 2: Battlelines since May of this year when the game debuted at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. The Pseudo Interactive-developed game is the sequel to this year's destructive Xbox 360 racer that gave you an armored car, armed to the teeth, and let you zip around wrecking carnage. While the 360 version had some neat ideas, such as the time-bending "unwreck" feature that let you rewind out of any fatal crashes, the game didn't quite live up to its potential. For the follow up, Pseudo has taken the game to Sony's upcoming console and attempted to build on its predecessor by tweaking the gameplay and addressing player concerns. After getting sporadic playtime with the title over the last few months, we finally had the chance to sit down and clock in a generous amount of time with the game's various modes to see just how it's coming together.

You'll find three major modes in Full Auto 2: career, arcade, and online. The career mode is a story-style mode that's light on story, though it does explain the reasons why you're racing around exploding everything you can. You'll wind up going through roughly 50 missions that will include a variety of different race types such as standard races, escort missions, death matches, and arena battles. As you progress through the game and complete missions, you'll open up new cars and weapons that will make your life a little easier. The various events will also open up more tracks and environments in the city where the story takes place, New Meridian. For those who played the first game, you'll likely recognize some content from the original game, but Pseudo has done more than simply recycle cars, weapons, and environments. The team has gone ahead and redone the content from the old game to better fit FA2 on the PS3. As such, you'll find 22 tracks in total, which break down to 13 new tracks made up of seven new race tracks and six new arenas. Of the game's 27 cars, you'll find six new cars among the five classes. As far as your arsenal goes, the game will feature 20 weapons in total, with nine being new.

Arcade is a quick way to hop into a race and lets you set up one of three race types--race, gladiator, and team gladiator--in any environment using whatever content you have available. The game lets you hone your skills for the career or online games thanks to some rather aggressive and hateful artificial intelligence opponents who are a handful to deal with.

Online lets you test your skills against any challengers over the Internet and lets you play one of five types of matches--the familiar gladiator, team gladiator, and race, as well as online-exclusive modes cat and mouse and base assault--with up to eight friends. We had the chance to try out the various modes and were pleased by how they played. The races were straightforward, while the gladiator and team gladiator matches create the good kind of hectic for an online game. Base assault is a fun and crazy race to grab a bomb and slam it into an opposing team's base. Cat and mouse is a loony game where teams must protect a player flagged as a "mouse" while trying to take out their opposition's designated rodent. As far as online performance goes, though our game wasn't done, it ran pretty well. There were the expected lag hits in a few spots but nothing that brought the action to a standstill. One downer to the experience is that the online game doesn't currently support voice chat, which we do miss from the original.

Overall, Full Auto 2's gameplay is still about high-speed racing, blowing cars up, and mass destruction. However, there have been some tweaks done to refine the action and lend a better flow to races. The events in career mode are more varied, and the mission structure is a bit more open. You'll find that there are only three missions that are specifically set up like tutorials, unlike the original game's lengthy set of tutorial races. Building up your boost and unwreck is now tied to performing stunts such as skids and catching air, as opposed to leveling everything around you. This makes using unwreck as a get-out-of-jail-free card a little tougher. Another big change is how the environments work into the action, as many now feature elements you can interact with by shooting at them to trigger events that can stomp opponents (or you, if you're not careful).

Control in the game is solid and comes in two flavors, a default configuration and the classic scheme. Default has you using the PS3's two sets of shoulder buttons for your core actions. The top buttons will serve as boost and unwreck, while the lower triggers will brake and accelerate. Up on the D pad will let you change your camera view, and down will let you do a one-touch replay. Triangle will let you look behind you during a race, while square will let you use the handbrake. X will fire your primary weapon, and circle will fire your secondary weapons. You'll steer with the left analog stick and click it to fire your mortar weapon. The right analog stick will let you aim your weapons, and you can fire them by clicking it in.

If the default setup is not to your liking, the game will also feature a classic configuration that feels more like the original game's control scheme. The top shoulder buttons will fire your primary and secondary weapons, while the lower set will let you look back and use your handbrake. Up on the D pad will change your camera, while down will do a replay. The left analog stick will steer and fire a mortar when clicked, and the right stick will aim and fire specific weapons. Triangle will let you perform an unwreck, and the square button will let you brake and reverse. The X button will accelerate, and circle is boost. Though both the configurations are solid and handle well, we'd still like to be able to configure our controls exactly the way we want--but we're demanding like that.

Full Auto 2's visuals pick up where its predecessor left off and offer a good array of large environments that can be destroyed in all manner of spectacular ways. The city of New Meridian is a massive metropolis with plenty of variety in its courses. This time out, there's a bit more order to the tracks, which are spread out among the different themed districts in the city. The cohesion is subtle, but it works out well.

The cars themselves are sexy and detailed, and they break apart with reckless abandon as you take damage or slam into traffic or other immovable objects. The extra layer of polish to the whole shebang comes from the various visual effects thrown in to enhance the action. You'll see flashy explosions, as well as screen filters for explosions and when you unwreck or boost. The game looks sharp running on standard sets and obviously gets sexier as the resolution increases, with 1080p being the pinnacle. We're especially pleased with the game's frame rate, which has gotten considerably more stable in the months since we've seen it. There are still inconsistencies at this point, especially when running at 1080p, but they're not too bad. We're crossing our fingers that the final game winds up with a rock-solid frame rate.

The sound in the game takes the best elements from the original, such as the adaptive audio, and mixes in some licensed tunes and muscular effects. The experience doesn't differ too radically from the original game. You'll hear muscular engine and weapon effects, along with ripping explosions. The licensed tunes and adaptive audio play off each other well thanks to a new mixing method that has your in-game rivals' music tied to them, so you'll hear it fade in and out according to their proximity. When they're next to you, their music will play over the game's soundtrack until you take them out, which is a cool, subtle touch.

Based on what we played, Full Auto 2 looks like it's offering a good mix of what worked in the original, with some improvements on that formula and some all-new content. The combination appears to be working well on the PS3. Pseudo's tweaks and additions seem to make for a better playing experience. Full Auto 2: Battlelines is slated to ship this November alongside the launch of the PlayStation 3 hardware.