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Starting from the very bottom of the food chain, you’ll have to fight your way up the ranks until you can challenge the bosses and free the city. You won’t totally be alone however. Installed in you car is a state of the art AI who will give you information on what you’re going to face, as well as what you can face it with.

Starting out is deceptively simple. You pick your car, its color (called a skin) and what your going to equip it with. However you don’t get all the goods right at the start. Additional cars and weapons can be unlocked in career (story) mode, if you’re good enough, of course.

There’s quite a bit to do and see in Full Auto 2, you can drive in arcade mode, play against other players online, or compete against others via split screen in your own home. There’s also a death-match available as well as the ability to practice tracks you’ve never been on.

There are at least eight different cars that you can fully trick out with various weapons sets (there’s 10) and different colour styles to make your car unique. There are also six different districts to visit, each with a variety of races and bad guys to bring to justice. Along with each district is a destructible environment key to that area. For example, in a industrial district you’ll find huge sprawling factories and construction equipment, while in a financial district the buildings tend to be fairly posh and there are high end vehicles just waiting to be shot at.

Career mode is just that, you take to the streets in an attempt to bring the various gang lords to justice. Generally in a career mode game you’re given a set of objectives to try and reach, usually finish a track alive, with a set of secondary objectives that can be filled. In order to achieve new weapons and unlock cars you’ll need to achieve these secondary objectives which usually tend to include finishing the race with out dying, kill X number of opponents, or finish race below set time. Unfortunately the secondary objectives tend to be fairly tough to finish and may require multiple tries at tracks in order to achieve.

Visually the game is quite appealing, with everything that would normally be in a busy district of town present, everything from glass covered walkways to little sidewalk cafйs as well as some traffic coming from the opposite direction. The only thing that isn’t present are pedestrians, who have no business on the busy streets.

Right up along side the awesome graphics, it’s like your driving in a movie, there is a totally destructible environment. If you can shoot it, drive over it, or crash through it in the real world chances are you’ll be able to do the same to it in the game world. There are also alternate paths through things. I recall that in one particular map you can take a shortcut through a hotel instead of going around it. Better hone the driving skills, however, because while you can drive through the hotel doors, the walls on each side of said doors are impassable, and it’s a little harder to get through them at a hundred miles per hour. You’ll also be able to find hidden power-ups for your car as you careen down the streets at blistering speeds, power ups that repair your car or give you unlimited boost, as well as some that give you improved weapons. Keep in mind, however, that these gems are on and off the beaten path and that the computer AI will recognize and use them as well. It’s very well to pick up weapon power up of doom and obliterate some computer scum with it, it’s quite another thing to have the computer pick up some weapon power up of doom and start obliterating you.

The sound is fairly well done, however you’ll tend not to notice the backdrop sounds of cars revving and shots going off. Sega has instead taken independent music artists and inserted their music in various parts of the game. In fact, I remember the songs playing better then any other random sound from the game.

Control is achieved by the use of the standard PS controller, standard as it hasn’t changed much in three generations. All the buttons required to drive a car are there, as well as a few things that are not. The key functions of drive, break, accelerate and shoot are all covered and easy to use, while some more difficult functions like look-back, aiming your gun turrets and instant replay are available for the more dexterous of us. If you play the game on a regular basis all these controls will become second nature to you. If your not a twitch junky like some it might be a little more difficult than you realize to try and control nine or ten different things at the same time.

I’ve noticed two major flaws in the game, and unfortunately these flaws can limit the amount of playability in the game for most of us. Unless your bound and bent on finishing the game without cheating, it might take cheat codes to do it.

One major flaw I found is that everything, and I do mean everything, is limited by the career mode. While you can explore some of the later environments in the game via the arcade feature, the cars and weapons that are available to the computer won’t be available to you until you unlock them via the career mode. It puts a bit of a damper on things when the computer has tactical missiles and homing lasers to use on you and you’re limited to machine guns and shotguns. If you’re not very good at the game or just can’t handle the frustration of driving the same track over and over again, you’ll probably not get very far into the game. Even by using cheat codes, there’s exactly one available on the net for the research savvy, you will still find that most everything you need to achieve in game is based on story mode.

The second major flaw that I’ve noticed is that the difficulty does not scale well to the ability of the player. You’ll just be awarded shotguns when the computer is getting heavier armour, better cars and weapons. While I can see it as incentive to staying alive and getting better, there’s only so much that can be done when your given very low odds of successfully finishing the map. Even in later stages that can be visited via the arcade menu you’re limited to what ever you can unlock in career mode. While these flaws won’t break the game, you would be better to rent this and try it before you decide to buy it.

In my opinion, since I’ve spend quite a bit of time playing this game, it’s a fun filled romp through city streets fraught with danger. You can blow almost anything up, and it’s particularly satisfying venting a computer opponent with bullets. Having said that I’m not particularly impressed with the difficulty of the game and I resent having to resort to cheat codes to get anywhere in the game. I brought a friend over who’s particularly good at driving games and he ends up hitting the same walls I do. If you have a choice with this game, I would highly recommend renting this before you buy it if you have the option. You’ll either love the game right off the bat or hate it.