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Full Auto 2 Battlelines for the PS3 provides fantastic racing / car destruction gameplay that has great graphics and very fun gameplay.
First, the setup. It is a rough and dirty future where a street gang sporting fast cars has taken over the streets, making the average citizen afraid to venture outdoors. A sentient computer system is trying to save the city, and wants you to infiltrate this gang to take it down. So you are street racing with machine guns and bombs in order to save the world :)
The game tosses you right into the fun with a triple mission of infiltration. You get races and kill-the-other deathmatches. Where it might be rough in other games to get thrown into the action, it's actually really fun here. You blast away with your machine guns, zoom around corners, and discover the secret paths to make your laps go more quickly. The basic objectives are relatively simple to hit, but you get encouraged to try again for the secondary objectives to get skins. I like that they tell you up front what you'll win if you hit your marks.
The graphics are very well done. The cities are gritty, with run down alleys and broken down storefronts. It's a lot of fun to blast away at the other cars, watching pieces fly and the environment destruct. You can cause many things to happen by destroying your world buildings fall doesn on rival cars, new pathways open.
There isn't much to say here about sound. There's the sound of squealing tires, explosions and blasting weapons. Your computer friend has the calm, even voice that prods you onward in your quest. The music soundtrack is sort of a low key urban rhythm that is very unobtrusive and doesn't distract you when you are trying to juggle the 7 cars bearing down on you.
This isn't a simple Mario Kart style of game. You really are tested in your skills. There are multiple paths, multiple enemies, multiple styles of cars, weapons, defenses and skills. As you go through the game you unlock a large number of options, and it comes down to your particular style of gameplay as to which works best for you. Some people are snipers, some are in-your-face blasters. The cars I customize will vary greatly from those my friends create, and each one works wonderfully for the way we play.
This is also what makes the game shine in multiplay. You have to think creatively about how to defend yourself against a given car with its weapons configuration, and how to best attack them. Multiply this by multiple opponents and you can see how this becomes a game requiring both fast fingers and an agile brain.
Even the cut scenes and config screens have much better graphics than previous games. They put work into each and every aspect here.
There are only minor complaints if you change your controller config, it still prods you to do the "standard" button presses in the game. Also, I still find the zoom in after a kill to be annoying and unnecessary.
Highly recommended!
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Full Auto 2 is a part racing, part blowing stuff up game. This game puts you behind the wheel of a variety of souped up vehicles equipped with various weapons and offers a number of ways to play, ranging from races (with weapons, of course) to 'Gladiator' mode deathmatches. There's a story driven career mode (the story is pretty weak, however) with events that offer both primary and secondary goals and reward you with unlockable vehicles, weapons, and skins for your vehicles. There are also many ways to play multiplayer, both online and in head to head offline mode.
The good and bad of the game:
THE GOOD:
Tons of stuff to blow up and break. That's one of the great features of this game. In races you can take out streetlights, vehicles, glass buildings, and lots more, and in the gladiator fights you can wreak havoc by shooting tanker trucks full of oil and knocking over stacks of huge pipes (as well as much, much more). Driving through a building might result in your vehicle breaking through the floor and tumbling to the ground, and hitting certain parts of some structures may cause an entire building to collapse.
The deathmatches, called Gladiator matches in the game, are a blast, even against the computer AI. With so much destructible stuff lying around the multiplayer maps become an absolute warzone with bullets, missiles, and explosions all over the place. The PS3 handles all the action pretty well too.
You can create new paths by destroying certain parts of maps.
Head to head multiplayer is a great option for offline gaming, and something that's lacking in a lot of games these days.
Tons of unlockables
Each event in career mode has primary and secondary objectives, so you can pass the event without doing everything perfect and go back and try for the secondaries later when you're up to the challenge.
THE BAD:
If you want to use better weapons in multiplayer modes you've got to unlock those weapons in career mode first. Putting yourself in a gladiator match right out of the box will have you fending off computer opponents with flame throwers, missiles, lasers--all kinds of stuff--with your machine gun and smokescreen. If it's REALLY necessary to unlock all the weapons the computer opponents in deathmatches shouldn't have them either.
Vehicle control leaves something to be desired, especially when you're racing. It's not just that it's tough to get used to--most of the vehicles just don't respond all that well to the controls, which is a mild annoyance in a wide open Gladiator match but a serious drawback when you're racing through narrow streets.
This game was a lot of fun overall. Comparisons to the Twisted Metal franchise are not misplaced, but this is a good game in the absence of a TM title on the PS3. While the Career mode leaves something to be desired the multiplayer options more than make up for it. There's nothing groundbreaking in Full Auto 2, but it's still a lot of fun.
Buy Full Auto 2: Battlelines Now
I have to admit I had second thoughts about buying battle games to my boys. However, I decided to try a game where bloody images were not the main topic, but racing and defeating other cars do. My boys liked this game, because of the difficulty in this part. I liked it because of we do not see blood everywhere.
Read Best Reviews of Full Auto 2: Battlelines Here
I don't see why this game gets bad reviews. Maybe it is because the vehicles you start with suck. Once you unlock a few cars and weapons, this game really picks up. The story in the campaign mode is a little over the top, but the gameplay is great and very challenging (in a good way). You can opt to breeze right through the game and unlock a lot of stuff on your way, or you can go through and systematically beat every challenge and sub-challenge for each stage and unlock everything. Regardless, once you have a little time under your belt, go immediately to the Online Gladiator matches. This is where the game really shines. The Ranked arena is frequented by some players with some great skills, and it is fun to try to keep up (unlike some games where it is frustrating to keep getting shot Online, this one gives you a fighting chance to stay alive by the lack of spawn camping that the game inherently has due to the fast and furious gameplay, open fields, etc, in addition to the ability you have to blast the turbos and get away from your pursuers). I've enjoyed this game more than any other PS3 game I have, including (dare I say it?) CoD4, R6V, and Assain's Creed. Those games are fun, but they just don't have the lasting appeal that FA2 has (CoD4 comes close as it is an awesome game for different reasons still, I would rather be playing FA2).
The unranked arenas also give a few more choices for gameplay that you can't get on single player or in the ranked arenas, such as Base Assault (quasi-capture the flag-esque game) and the Cat & Mouse Race (2 slow moving trucks on opposing teams race while everyone else gets the fast & tough cars called Warlords that go and try to prevent the opposing teams truck from finishing first).
After playing this game for a month or so, I actually went out and bought 3 more PS3's and 3 more copies of FA2 just so I could play against my kids (yes, my wife was quite irritated at me). On the weekends when Mom is sleeping in, we all "sneak" into the the living room where I move our other TV's in and we camp out there and blast each other for hours. The only other game that has come close to providing my kids and I this much fun was Mario Kart Double Dash for the Game Cube (NOT the Wii version don't get me started on how they stripped out the ability to unlock on coop mode but I digress).
Full Auto 2 has great graphics. Yes, every now and then you'll have the stray box or pipe that falls "through" you or something like that, but in all actuality, I notice stuff like that happening on most every game (including Haze, which just released). It doesn't detract from the game at all since a) it doesn't happen all that often and b) the game is moving just too darn fast for you to notice. The actually look of the graphics is quite sharp, everything is well lit (even the darker areas) so you never have a hard time seeing, the environment is quite destructible (you can blow all sorts of stuff and it STAYS blown up, unlike the little fake bullet holes that appear and magically disappear in many FPS's). You can even use the environment to kill your opponents (like blowing up an overhead rail, causing the speeding train passing by overhead to fall, crash, and blow up on your opponents, or blowing up a tower that when it falls, causes tunnels and ramps to appear, etc). The cars are detailed, and so is the damage that appears when you get shot. In fact, the damage is customized so that machine gun damage appears different than a missle, which is different from flame damage or even the look of a general crash into a wall.
As far as gameplay physics go, many people complain about the cars feeling "floaty". This is where I see the most flak for this game come from, and this is why in my first comment on this game I assume that these people just never tried to unlock any of the upgraded cars. Sure, the starter vehicles suck, but that just motivates you to unlock the better ones. In fact, the Enforcer (the police car) is one of the first cars you unlock, and it is one that has good enough stats and durability that it can be easily used to keep up with even the last few cars that you can unlock. It handles fine, as do most of the vehicles (minus the starters and the Phanthom). Of course, none of the car physics can match up with Gran Turismo 5, but come on, this is an arcade racer/FPS. I doubt slapping guns on GT5 cars would be very fun at all due to the realism (seriously how many realistic cars could withstand a missle shot especially those in GT5 that don't even show the damage?). Anyway, my take on the physics is that they handle the way I'd expect them to for the most part and aren't anything to complain about at all.
As far as variety of maps go, the races have more than enough to keep any ADHD player occupied for hours. The gladiator arenas definitely have enough to keep the online play from getting stale, but I do wish there had been more gladiator maps. I really think that if this game had come out now, the developers (now out of business thanks for pulling out on them there, Eidos) would have been able to garner a lot more attention to this game by offering the downloadable maps that the current game developers are just now really starting to get into. Who knows, if they had offered a half-dozen extra arenas at 5 or 10 bucks or something, maybe that would have been enough to keep the afloat long enough to get some more gigs? That's probably just wishful thinking on my part, but who knows?
Are there cons to this game? Well, the biggest and only real con is the lack of players Online. It can be difficult to sometime to find others on the boards, and if you aren't patient enough, you may get the feeling that you've entered a ghost town when looking through the ranked and unranked areas. Rest assured, though, there ARE regulars that play, and many times you just have to go to the ranked arenas and just camp out for about 5-10 minutes (oftentimes the regulars are in a match, which is 10 minutes long for a ranked gladiator match, which means that if you wait, all of a sudden you'll have 5 or 6 players pop up all at once as they go for another round but you do have to camp out as when there are players going round after round, you only have about a 15 second window to catch the wave or else their next match will begin without you, and you'll have no idea that they were ever there).
All in all, Full Auto 2 is great. I hope there is a way to squeeze out a Full Auto 3, but with the developers out of business and as much unwarranted flak this game received, there is hardly a chance of Sega trying to ressurect the title. I never played Twisted Metal before, so I can only hope that the PS3 version comes out and plays as well as FA2. Until then (and most likely long thereafter), I'm going to be online playing FA2.
Want Full Auto 2: Battlelines Discount?
I like this game a lot; I would have given it 5 stars but you have to play the career mode to unlock more weapons and cars for Aracade and multi-player modes. To me this knocked the game value down since I bought this game for the sole purpose to play against other opponents. So instead of playing each other immediately we are now trying to complete most of career mode to unlock more cars and weapons; to me this is a waste of my time and energy. The game is fun once you have 50% of it unlock and well worth the money; though it would be nice to start off with more than 2 weapons and 3 cars.
