Pseudo Interactive's Full Auto was an Xbox 360 game, and a fun one too, sending the increasingly pretentious racer genre back to its Twisted Metal days of extreme violence. It was great. Now they've released Full Auto 2: Battlelines exclusively for the Playstation 3, cutting themselves off from their previous market. It's a curious decision.

It might be partly explained by Full Auto 2's resemblance to its predecessor, but both sequels and driving games are prone to repetition, and Pseudo Interactive have made some small but significant changes to the gameplay. There's a tacked on story, in which you are, unbelievably, on the side of Law and Order, but fortunately it's not going to matter one bit. You still get to blow things up.

The biggest change is the addition of an arena mode, and arena levels to the career mode. It's a move that makes sense, as much as anything does in a game that's all about strapping heavy armoury to cars. Career mode has also been tweaked, adding secondary objectives to levels. You can progress without achieving them, but they'll unlock new cars and weapons if you do get them, and they add extra challenge and replay value. You can also have more than one level on the go at once, instead of having to go through in strict linear order.

In addition, your rewind meter is now the same as your boost meter. The more you use your boost, the less ability you'll have to undo damage to your car. That's two very good reasons not to drive into a concrete pillar at full speed, but you'll still do it, and laugh when you do.

The other change that's going to make a significant different to your gameplay is the way the weapons are set up. In Full Auto, you fitted weapons in pairs. The stronger the forward weapon, the weaker the rear, and vise versa. In Full Auto 2: Battlelines, that system has been completely done away with, and you're free to fit whatever you want from the weapons you've unlocked - as long as your car can take them. Smaller, faster cars don't have the mass to handle the larger weapons, and they can handle less damage from other weapons and falling masonry, so for every level you need to decide whether you want speed or grunt.

One of the great things about the first Full Auto game was the fully destructible environments, and Battlelines continues in that vein. If you can see it, you can blow it up. Full Auto 2 actively encourages you to destroy surrounding buildings, creating roadblocks and jump points, creating new combat arenas, and uncovering power-ups. It's tricky to drive full speed and aim at the same time, as it should be, but destruction is a reward in itself. The game takes full advantage of the PS3's hardware, filling the screen with flying debris and coping just fine most of the time.

The game offers several multiplayer options, the new arena levels naturally lending themselves to multiplayer particularly well. You can play deathmatch and team deathmatch offline, or a nice selection of on-line multiplayer modes. Cat and Mouse (you hide from your friend, he tracks you down and smashes the hell out of you) and Base Assault (catch the bomb and use it to blow up your opponent's base before he does the same to you) are only available online. They add some extra variety to the normal tournament modes. This appears to offer nicely balanced ranked or unranked matches, but it's a little hard to tell because of the big problem that plagues all Playstation 3 games online: there's no-one there. No-one is playing, and assembling enough players to put together a single game could literally mean hours of waiting. It's like waiting for a party to start when the guys next door and their 360s have already had a visit from the cops.

Full Auto 2: Battlelines isn't any more grown-up than the first game. If you want to whine about physics or plot there'll be plenty to complain about and you should probably go play Ridge Racer or something. But when it comes to driving really stupidly and blowing the crap out of stuff, then one of the Full Auto games is the way to go.