FUEL Review

It's sad to see such an open environment provide such little charm.

Fuel is attempting to do what a number of other games have done before it: become the ultimate driving experience. With over 70 vehicles and an absolutely colossal map, it all seems so good. Too good to be true, one might say.

When you start playing FUEL the gravity of all that's available to you hits and you think that you're onto a winner. It's a delight at first; the graphics seem polished and the map is endless. Give it five minutes and the sheen soon disappears. Pop-up becomes prevalent, rolling fog is a bit too in your face and the car models only look half-decent because of a disproportionate amount of motion blur, as if the lens is smeared in Vaseline.

Then the framerate starts to drop, and you soon realise that the mutton has not only taken off its lamb costume, but has also burnt it to ashes with fire.

Not to worry, though. The gameplay is visibly diverse and the number of things to see, do and experience is in the hundreds.

There's a few different racing modes, though many of them don't even try to excite. Don't fall for racing to each destination, though. Press start and look at the challenges, do them and then move on to the next. If you go to the site of the race, given the locations and map are so faceless, you might end up doing the same one three or four times without realising. I know I did.


The worst thing is, if you drive there - which can sometimes take an age - you'll soon lose all your desire to race at the designated spot. It's a dire situation when you can't be bothered to drive in a driving game.

This is probably because the race modes simply aren't exciting enough. A classic example of this is following a helicopter to beat it to the finishing marker. You drive in a straight line until you avoid an obviously laid trap or two and you continue on your merry way. Nothing will slow you down. You'll win. Hooray.

More traditional racing can be quite tricky at first, but once you nail the handbrake-turn and understand the concept of cleverly-placed checkpoints, you pass everyone by. It's not even that close between you and the AI either, if you pull away early enough you'll start to rack up hundreds of metres of space between you and second place you'll never see them again, even if you end up ploughing into an implausibly-situated rock.

Another game mode is to simply chase a car and hit it with yours. Need more of an explanation? You're not getting one, because that's it. The AI doesn't even decide to take a less kosher route to lose you, either. Lazy.


The main mode that the game prides itself on is getting from one point to another in the allotted time. You can follow the floating arrows and make it in good time, though to drive by your own rules is actually pretty fun. You'll feel like a war hero for successfully navigating through a wood and massively berate yourself for trying to drive up that slope before realising that it's an epic fail.

God forbid you mess any of these races up first time by the way. Loading times hark back to the Original PlayStation days, supposedly generating the land as it plays the same generic rock song over the almost omnipresent Fuel logo while you're waiting; and waiting.

Then again, you're rewarded by a laughably poor intro showing you being dropped in by helicopter at the start. Even when you're on a motorbike, you'll be airlifted to 30ft above the ground before being dropped straight down. It seems a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek approach to getting from A to B, but it soon seems unnecessary and in no way documents the wholesale ball-busting that would usually take place upon landing.


One thing that also disappointed were the sound effects. Sometimes they simply don't represent what's happening. Many times, it will happily screech knowingly when you tail-slide on the tarmac after slamming onto the road following an off-road pursuit. But during many parts of the game you have absolutely no sound-effects at all. What would usually sound like a suspension-cracking crash suddenly becomes acceptable due to silence, as the effects don't back up what's displayed.

The music can thankfully be replaced with custom soundtracks but that's not what most people want. A bit of song licensing would have been nice, or even giving a platform to unsigned bands, a la Flatout, would have been great too, but no.

FUEL falls into a strange category for those interested in it. It can sometimes be a little too addictive to simply rent, yet it doesn't really warrant a full price purchase at all. It's good to kill time with, yet there's no real feeling of contentment after playing it. There's the overhanging feeling that it's building up to something amazing, something which will wow players...but it never arrives. A filthy deception, you'll soon find.

Another such deception is in the choice of vehicles; sure, you'll unlock wheels galore, yet it won't allow you to choose any one you want, even within the same class of cars. Most people will see the motorbikes and the quads and want to drive them all day, yet you won't be allowed to. Sucks to be you.


There's a raft of achievements, trophies, unlockables and even viewpoints to find. You won't do them, though. If anything, there's too much to do. You'll get used to the same liveries and paint schemes and you won't care about the customisable driver, who resembles a muscular and tattooed Compton-esque gangster version of Dave Gorman. He'll stay that way throughout, most likely.

You'll also struggle to travel around the generally featureless map for longer than two or three minutes before actively searching for a huge cliff to dive off, or a massive tree to do your best Marc Bolan impression on.

It's a shame - it's about time a developer created the ultimate open-world off-road driving experience. This is perhaps the nail in the coffin of the game; it doesn't get close to capitalising on what it's making itself out to be.

5/10

Matt Gardner