Fuel

We’re big Mad Max fans here at NowGamer, so we quite liked the idea of a huge open world racing game set in a post apocalyptic world, with precious fuel the prize. Actually that left us slightly scratching our heads; why if there’s not much fuel in the world, are we burning barrels of the stuff in pointless land races, just to win more of it? Surely there are better uses it could be put to? Food convoys or hospitals perhaps?

Still, that didn’t matter we reasoned, since the game from Codemasters developer Asobo Studios promised a solid campaign of epic races across huge post-apocalyptic wastes for pride and fuel. What we actually got isn’t so grand, and the trouble is that Fuel’s execution doesn’t match its interesting concepts, often leaving us more bored than anything else. Take it’s handling of the whole open world concept for starters.

There are five thousand square miles of varied American terrain to drive in – a massive amount - but the whole point of this ‘real world’ is defeated by the fact that you can access all the events via the menu. Fuel is broken up into vast areas centred on unlockable base camps as you move from camp to camp, tackling races, challenges and other events, with the ‘fuel’ you win used as points to buy various vehicles.

But vast empty spaces aren’t interesting; we’d have like a more unified feel to the piece with the approach of say ‘Burnout Paradise’, which is very alive with clusters of events that flow into each other. Fuel, conversely, feels disjointed, mostly barren and not encouraging to exploration; we often found ourselves trekking across miles of terrain with little to do. Fuels vast world doesn’t look too bad, with some impressive draw distances, and variable weather effects spicing things up, but what good is that if the actual racing career isn’t compelling?

Similarly, a fair selection of vehicles including bikes buggies and various racers is marred by arcade like but often very imprecise handling, and occasionally bad collision detection and physics. That, combined with vehicles lack of character (despite the fact you can find new liveries for them), often took the fun out of racing. We never felt a sense of real speed driving or that love for certain cars you usually develop in racing games. Events are mostly point to point racing, and while some try to be a slightly different, like clever races against helicopters or take down chases they’re spoilt by poor AI. The game annoyingly tries to circumvent that short coming by boosting all your opponents as far ahead as possible at the beginning of races, then slowing them down at the end so you can catch up, killing that ‘racing’ feel. The resulting difficulty curve is pretty erratic and coming in anything other than first in events means no points, so unlocking new base camps just feels long winded and laborious.

 Going online, you’ll be able to challenge other players to avoid that, but you’ll have to deal with varying degrees of lag and the myriad events are still the victims of Fuels very average race style. There is the ability to create your own courses for online play, but with Fuels racing feeling so uninspired we felt little urge to delve too deeply.

… continued