I know what you're thinking - Full Auto? Pah, it's just a second-rate Burnout with guns! And to be honest, that is indeed the first impression is gives. However, when you scratch beneath the surface - or rather when you scratch, smash, pulverise and blow up the surface, leaving it skittering across the road in a million pieces in your almighty wake, Full Auto is much more full-on than you might think.

Cars with guns has been done before and it'll be done again, and developers often fail to get that vital balance between satisfying races and explosive action. Not here though - Sega has done a magnificent job in providing thrilling racing combined with seriously destructive weaponry, as well as explosions that put Burnout: Revenge to shame. Yes, that's right, to shame! A bold claim, I hear you cry. Don't worry, it will be fully justified.

Upon firing up the game and watching the very exciting opening sequence, you're presented with a neat menu system incorporating all the usual options. Race head-to-head split screen with another player, head onto Xbox Live for up to eight player carnage, engage in a single race with a range of modes, or dive into the Career mode and start trawling your way through over 80 events. While the Tutorial section of Career mode is probably the best place to start in order to accustom you with the various features of the gameplay, it's not the best place for first impressions - the races are short and not that exciting, plus with loading breaks (only of a modest 10-15 seconds) before races, for restarting a race and for loading the menu back in at the end, it feels quite broken up. Still, the Tutorial races do a superb job of introducing each element of the gameplay very well.

Of course, the main draw here is weaponry, and while you're not given access to the big guns immediately, every weapon (bar the useless smokescreen) has significant bite to it. Generally speaking you'll be working with a primary weapon up front and a secondary defensive weapon behind; initially you've got machine guns, a shotgun or missiles to fire ahead and mines or grenades to drop behind, but in time you get rockets and a cannon too - the cannon fires a high velocity explosive shot, while your rocket launcher fires a spread of three or four rockets and both cause serious carnage. Occasionally you'll have access to full-on offensive weapon combos, where you have two front and no rear weaponry - machine guns and missiles is a superb combination, while the front grenades tend to be a bit weak and don't seem to do that much damage. My preference though is definitely the Assault configuration, machine guns up front and mines behind, so you can tear into enemies ahead and destroy those that are on your tail, trying to do the same to you.

About halfway through the Career mode you get the ability to tune weapons, so instead of having two Level 2 weapons, you can have one Level 1 and one Level 3, the latter being seriously enhanced. Missiles now home in, rockets are incendiary and set fire to vehicles, cannons blow enemies off course and mines and grenades scatter behind you with secondary explosions, while the shotgun and machine gun are both significantly more lethal than before. Whatever your tastes, you'll find the right combination for any situation and soon have your favourites.

The Career is nicely broken up across a range of different style challenges. The obligatory Time Trials (no weapons, just you against the clock) rear their ugly head, and slightly more exciting is the Pink Slips, one on one also with no weapons. Don't worry though - these are few and far between! Some modes require you to wipe out one or more rival racers, others see you chasing and destroying a series of unwilling victims, some have extra enemies in there who aren't racing and just want to take you out, then there are modes like Rampage, where you have to take out a set target of innocent passers-by on your way to the finish line, a little like Burnout's Traffic Attack mode (but with guns). There's a great section where two teams are pitted against each other too, a tough section where if you get wrecked it's game over, and Enduro features some of the greatest and most epic races you'll find.

A real effort has been made to put in plenty of variety, and so some races are point-to-point, others are laps of a circuit, then you've got your eliminator races where last place is destroyed each lap, and there's a nifty down and back mode, where you race to the end, turn around, then head back to the start line to finish. The type of race often determines which weapon set you choose - as your mines stay in place throughout the race, circuit races are worth using mines for, as are down and back, while point to point can often be more about blitzing your way into first place before the end of the race. As well as this, there are often multiple objectives for gaining gold - finish first and within a set time, or destroying a certain number of rivals, or with a set number of wreck points. Wreck points are awarded for destroying anything, and you can get up to a x5 multiplier if you keep the damage going every couple of seconds (grenades are great for keeping up your multiplier), but the main way you score them is by destroying opponents - the best I've done (on actual competitors, not easy to kill traffic) is seven in a row - see if you can beat that!

Unfortunately, where the modes have variety, the tracks lack them - there aren't that many tracks available and they soon start to feel a bit repetitive, although it's admittedly useful to know your route well and there are a few quite sneakily hidden short cuts if you're willing to explore. The range of locations is limited too, as there are only four main areas - the city, the industrial zone, the rocky back roads and a shipyard full of cargo containers - with various routes mapped around each. A couple of the city routes have nice touches, like speeding through a burning building, or up a ramp and over a casino, plus there's a great route where you can ram opponents into the water on one particularly vicious corner, but it can feel a bit samey and certainly doesn't have the same creativity as Burnout in this respect. The range of cars on offer is great though - split into three classes (and one Special class with a unique car called the Warlord), you have a range of cars, trucks, jeeps, sports cars and hot rods to choose from and each looks the business, rated on the three simple stats of speed, handling and durability.

Graphically, Full Auto can't initially compete with the wondrous visuals of Burnout: Revenge - the car models aren't quite as shiny and the scenery isn't quite as detailed. However, where Full Auto beats Burnout hands down is in the fully destructible environments. Everything - and I mean everything - can be utterly destroyed, and the amount of carnage on offer puts Burnout in the shade. Fire a salvo of missiles into a building and watch the rubble fly, the glass shatter, the nearby phone boxes, fire hydrants and other roadside objects explode with tremendous detail. There are also many handily placed, highly explosive objects just waiting for you to blow them up - big gas tankers, propane tanks (which speed off in a jet of flame before hitting a building or, better yet, a competitor and exploding), and much more - the first time you blow up a petrol station and see the entire thing go up in flames, wreckage scattering in every direction, you simply won't believe your eyes.

And you'll have the chance to not believe your eyes too, thanks to the incredibly neat one-touch replay feature. At any time in a race, simply hit down on the d-pad and the last ten seconds of racing will be replayed. Initially it's not very clear how this works, but hit the green button and the action freezes - then you have full control. Use the triggers to wind it back and forwards (the amount you depress the trigger controlling whether it's normal speed, slow-mo or even frame by frame) and use the analogue sticks to zoom in or out and around your vehicle. Now, here's the scenario - I finally discover how to use one-touch replay properly having just destroyed a petrol station, and before that, an enemy driver, so I watch in awe as I shoot the enemy driver and watch the car explode in flames, as its bodywork spills outwards and it flies into the air, then a massive secondary explosion engulfs it, as I head into the petrol station and fire my rockets. As I pass under the petrol station, the entire thing explodes in clouds of flame, the entire roof flies up, nearby fuel barrels that I've shot fly up into the air, and as I swivel the camera around, I watch in amazement as the wreckage rains down, the barrels coming back to earth and the petrol station sign landing on my car as I speed away!

The way every object and vehicle is lifted by a big explosion makes them seem so real and the physics of all this is second to none - it really does show you just how detailed and remarkably versatile the graphics engine of Full Auto really is; it's just so solid and brilliantly programmed that you'll never see any glitching graphics or objects merging with each other - it is utterly convincing. Although overall it doesn't look quite as nice as Burnout: Revenge, because of the amount of effort put into the damage modelling, explosions and wreckage physics, and the lovely one-touch replay that shows it off so incredibly well, it still gets full marks from this humble reviewer!

Seriously though, when you watch these replays, what is truly stunning is that they're fully 3D, so at any freeze frame moment you can spin around the action, Matrix-style, and see that every bit of wrecked metal, every wheel, every vehicle, even every spark, is fully scaling, real-time 3D. You can watch frame by frame as a gas tanker goes up in the air, the flames literally billowing outwards, entirely engulfing your vehicle, then you speed triumphantly out as the flames evaporate and the wrecked tanker crashes back down behind you. Also, keep an eye out for the drivers - they're always ejected when a car explodes and the rag doll physics are brilliant! One time the poor guy landed on the road only to be run over by another car - talk about hilarious!! (If you're twisted like me, that is!) Another time I blew up a car and it flew, along with its driver, right into two parked gas tankers, which I blew up, and the subsequent explosion launched a truck into the air, as the tankers flew up, the driver vanished in the flame and the car itself was propelled high into the air, off the pier and into the drink.

The downsides of one-touch replay? You can't really zoom out far enough to take in the full spectacle (it's reasonable, but I'd like to be able to zoom much further), you can't watch the entire race in this fashion and you can't save your replays and upload them for the world to see, which is an absolutely crying shame. Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic innovation as it is, but if they could put all this into Full Auto 2, plus a Driv3r-style director mode so you can film the entire race (or just parts of it) from whichever perspective you like, spinning around, slowing down and speeding up at will, then it will be the greatest innovation to hit a racing game since, well, a boost bar!

Speaking of which, your boost bar is quite limited in Full Auto and you can't activate it until it's full, so use it wisely - you get boost for power sliding around corners and getting air; not exactly original, but it's a system that perfectly complements the gameplay. Another system that's new to racing games (as far as I'm aware) is the Prince of Persia style Unwreck system. As you cause carnage, your Unwreck bar fills up and at any time you can simply hold RB for a few seconds and time will wind backwards. Did you just take that jump at the wrong angle and end up turtling (on your roof)? Or did you smack into that wall way too hard and destroy yourself? Or did you just take a brutal assault of mines that finished you off? Whatever the problem, even when you've been destroyed, just hit Unwreck and have another try! This system is so very, very cool and incredibly useful, removing a lot of the frustration without taking away too much of the challenge, and it soon becomes second nature to rewind, then straighten yourself out for that jump, or slow down a bit sooner for that corner, or dodge that mine and waste the guy that just wasted you. Utterly brilliant!

As for the on-screen display, it's top notch - everything you need to know is on the screen - boost and unwreck bar, speed, a handy map showing the road layout and locations of competitors, your weapon availability (complete with an overheat display, which if filled up causes the weapon to jam for a few seconds before you can use it again) and your armour display. This is particularly crucial, as you have armour on the left, right, front and rear of your car, which degrades as you're shot or ram into things too fast, or are caught in nearby explosions. Once you've lost armour in any area, one good hit with a mine or a missile will finish you off, so you find yourself driving in a way that strategically protects your vulnerable area as best you can. I've only ever survived to see every last bit of armour taken away once, and I didn't last long after that!

The main problem with the single player mode is that for the first half it can be quite a disjointed and often none too challenging experience. It's only when you get to the latter half of Career mode, with the biggest weapons and the more challenging enemies and objectives, that it really comes into its own, making the single player experience a little lonely and soulless at times. Still, this is where Xbox Live comes in! Unfortunately each ranked match ends with everyone being booted out (the room ends and the host must then start another room) but it only takes a few seconds to dive back in, thanks to the Quick Match, and when you're hosting, the options are so straightforward that you can set up a game within ten seconds. The modes of play are limited to solo circuit, point to point or down and back racing, which is a shame, as some team play games would have been an awesome inclusion, but I guess that'll be in Full Auto 2 (please make a sequel, Sega!)

As it is though, you have enough variety within the cars and just about enough tracks to keep things fresh - playing with real people is so much more fun, lively and unpredictable, as with all great games, and you'll find folks that are there for a bit of light entertainment rather than serious competition, because of the nature of the game. It's challenging though, and I'm yet to come first (have come damn close on occasion though!) but I've often got the highest score for killing competitors, by several kills, so at least my homicidal streak is very satisfied most of the time! When you get a good group of eight people together, and they all keep diving into the next game with Quick Match, it really can be terrific fun, and as you experiment with different weapons and tactics, you'll soon begin to find what works best for you against real and often very talented gamers. Be warned though - you've been spoiled in Career mode, as the Unwreck feature isn't available (it just wouldn't work with eight players constantly winding the action back!) so if you make a mistake, you have to live with it! This makes the game a lot tougher, but against real people you don't feel the same frustration as you would against the computer.

Sound wise, whether you're offline or on, the sound effects do the job, but aren't as spectacular as the visuals (weapons fire and engines noises are great, but the explosions aren't quite as ear shattering as you might expect) and the soundtrack of original compositions is reasonable, with a few good beats and varying styles, but none of them stand out tremendously, so get some of your favourite upbeat music together and create a Full Auto soundtrack with which to teach all those other wannabe drivers who's the daddy! Or, of course, the mummy…

If you're not hooked up for Xbox Live play, then Full Auto will be a relatively short-lived experience; as addictive and satisfying as the Career mode is, you'll be through it in well under ten hours' play and then the pull to come back will only be for a once in a while quick bout of destruction and mayhem, or to see just what amazing replay sequences you can come up with (destroying two gas tankers and three enemies all in the space of one replay is the best I've done thus far!) However, throw in online play and you've got an enduring title that hearkens back to the Xbox classic Midtown Madness 3, which had me hooked for months - it's the sort of game you can sit down and have a quick half hour blast with, or play for hours, and the combination of racing action (best viewed from the hood for extra speed sensation!), seriously beefy weapons and the most spectacular damage, wreckage and explosions that you've ever seen, makes for a truly addictive and entertaining mix. So, if you've had your Full of conventional racing titles, then you really Auto give this a try! [Dear God, please, somebody, stop him doing that! I just can't take it any more! Suffer-Ed].

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).