Your family was murdered by a nihilistic cult. Driven by revenge, you join a mysterious underground order to even the score. Your mission: fire up your killer ride, load up on devastating weapons, and drive the cultists out of town.

• Mission-based car combat with 25 action-packed levels
• Challenging, varied objectives: search and destroy, escort and defend, race to the death.
• 12 devastating weapons: Machine guns, missiles, plasma cannons, smokescreens, oil slicks, and more!
• Defend real cities from New York to Tokyo - 3D environments, pedestrians, and cross traffic.
• Multiple camera angles from in-car to full overhead views
• Manage fuel, ammo, and armor resources

Discussion
There are often surprises in the PlayStation library that for whatever reason I never tried the first time around. I’m pretty sure I was in my severely jaded / elitist gamer mindset during the late 90s, so it’s my own fault. Now that I’m older, arguably wiser, and more laid back in my retro-active gaming duties, I’m happy to say another (slightly tarnished) gem has popped up into the PlayStation library.

In Auto Destruct (I love that pun, seriously) you play a newly widowed husband and father faced with an interesting prospect: take revenge via an armored and heavily armored car belonging to an underground group that has ties to the police forces around the world. Your target is a nihilistic cult called Lazarus, whose recent attack on a mall left your wife and child among the dead. Through your new employer The Temple, you will travel the world as assist finding the various cult members and assuring they no longer function in the darkest sense.

Your quest for revenge will take you across the globe in several locales, with various missions ranging from offensive, defensive, and assistance. Here’s where the game’s main kink comes into play. Too many of the missions seem like distractions to the main cause – how can you attend to revenge when you’re too busy playing bodyguard for various characters, or constantly running cross-town trying to find weapons to fight the bad guys who are on the opposite side of wherever the weapons are?

That snippet aside, the rest of the game is amazingly well done, and holds up very well to this day. From a graphic standpoint, Auto Destruct is clean, has a pretty well laid out cityscape across its multiple locations, and never really suffers from slowdown and terrible texture warping. Truth be told, the game actually looks like a beta for Grand Theft Auto III on the PS2. While the amount of pedestrians and traffic is pretty thin, there are enough hidden areas, surprise ramps for jumps, and other little secrets that make the game fun to run around in. I played the game in both HDMI and through S-Video on the original PlayStation, and it looks great both ways. Voice-overs are well acted and clear, with a good variety in the sound and effects department.

Your miles will vary with the control – I’ve never been a fan of the sliding cars, but there’s just enough kick in the brake button to snap the car around when you need it to, just avoid grass above all else. More often than not there’s a nice little pool of water you go diving into and lose the mission.

Your weapons cache provides various missiles, machine guns, mines, and other fun little toys to hurl at the bad guy vehicles. Vehicles, I might add, that include every type of car you can imagine along with tanks and helicopters. Tanks…that happily roam the streets without anyone noticing…maybe that’s connected with the lack of pedestrians in the city! The tanks all got them…

In the end, the only thing stopping Auto Destruct from being a 100% awesome game is a pet peeve that should have been fixed. The game has no mid level progress save function – if you die, that’s it, start from scratch on that level. Having had to suffer through the tutorial 7 times because I kept dying in the first stage made it that much harder to continue on. If you don’t mind repeating yourself often, Auto Destruct is a pretty fun time in the city.

• Auto Destruct features a Memory Card screen where you can actually over-write a different game's save file completely. Why this was not made mandatory in all games is beyond me.
   
• Small problem with the morality in the game. Your character is bent on revenge for the wrongful death of his wife and daughter - yet you can unintentionally run down pedestrians and the game shows no remorse for those innocent you just splattered.
   
• The 2 Blocks required for save data is actually split between the two modes, Story and Time Trial.
   
• The game features a plethora of cheat options, but they can only equipped after activating a master cheat code, which I could not get to work.
   
• There are so few human models that it looks like there are only two kinds of clothing offered in the cities.
   
• Auto Destruct is another EA released game that has no inner tray artwork on the back insert.