FUEL

Set in an unprecedented 5,560 square miles (14,400 km²) of playing area FUEL is the latest open world racing game developed by ASOBO Studios and published by Codemasters. Global warming has eventually taken its toll and tsunami’s rage, tornado’s rip buildings apart and forests have burnt leaving only embers in the vast wilderness. All the inhabitants have fled to find a new life harnessing natures energy, where solar and wind power are king and fossil fuels are a distant memory. A group of racing junkies have returned to the once vibrant wasteland to feed their addiction of speed and racing with no consideration for the environment as they burn fuel with blatant disregard and fight each other to become the number one racer in the USA.

Having set the scene for this world record holding title I have actually highlighted the biggest issue with the game in that its playing area is huge in fact its enormous and between race or event locations there is a vast wasteland of nothingness, the odd truck or demolished building is about all you will see and having played over 40 hours of the game I can say that we didn’t see anything or anyone of real interest. There is a great distance between race locations and driving from event to event is tiresome, heli pads have been dotted around the zones to allow you to be transported quickly but this still leaves a great amount of driving through the wilderness.

The games career and challenge modes do make it easier for those of us who don’t want to ride around to each event and the races in each of the games 19 zones can be accessed through the menu system. The career mode is your key to unlocking each zone and by winning an event on one of three different difficulty levels players are awarded stars that when collected unlock the next zone. You are also awarded FUEL that allows you to buy bigger and better vehicles to enter into the races that lie ahead. The challenge mode however offers a different way of playing and through one of 7 different modes player get the chance to increase their FUEL by means of Speed Runs, Chopper Chasing, Endurance or Knockout to name a few of them.

Chasing Choppers is just one of the Challenges

As for the racing well it can be quite a buzz zipping around on and off road and I found that the smaller tighter turn courses where more challenging and much more enjoyable than the larger races where the distance between checkpoints is literally miles. The idea of racing over these vast distances is undoubtedly to win the race by whatever means and this can be by either sticking to the course or taking a short cut, but beware as cutting corners can slow your vehicle down if it isn’t suited for the off road environment. The AI is troublesome and when the race starts the opposition zip away like some sort of turbo charger kicked in then you end up spending the next couple of minutes catching up and passing each one without any real issue, this also begins to get tedious as leading the pack is lonely as you pull away without them making any attempt to catch you. I can also only remember seeing another vehicle crash on one occasion otherwise they just tootle around at a slightly slower speed than you and when you’ve passed them you wont see them again.

Where FUEL does find its niche though is in the amount of content that is in the game with 216 races set over the 19 zones racing fanatics will surely have enough to do and with 70 vehicles and the availability to customise both the paintwork and the livery of each you can really have some great looking vehicles. The driving character can also be customised with everything from helmet, clothes and tattoos being interchangeable as well as skin colour. More clothes and modifiers for the vehicles and drivers can be gained from winning events and also from finding them in the games zones and this will keep racers busy hunting to get every last piece. For those who don’t want to explore then you will need to find a Doppler truck roaming the lands and once unlocked and found crashing into it will reveal each unlockable item and show its position in the zone. The Doppler trucks can also be found to liberate the position of events and vista points in the zones which allow you the chance to see some of the scenic views of the wastelands and the in game GPS will be your best friend for getting you safely to your destination and it really is a god send in the huge playing environment.

The games vehicles are impressive and as I said earlier there are 70 of them ranging from scrambling bike up to monster truck and almost every combination in between. Each of the vehicles also has its own handling characteristics and a careful choice of vehicle will ensure you reach the front that little bit quicker. The physics of the vehicles is also a high point and the changes in handling through the different terrains can be quite demanding as drifting on the loose dirt really does differ from slowly fighting through a soaking wet beach. The games dynamic weather system failed to make an appearance or at least failed to give me the impression it was in any way dynamic, during races the tornados and thunderstorms seemed to be scripted and whilst in offline free ride we enjoyed the night and day transition but we failed to find any real bad weather as Tornado chasing would have added an edge to the mundane scenery.

Theres a tornado, quick we found it

As for online play there is online racing as well as online free ride which allows you to get together and make new racing partners or invite your friends list and its this part of the game that takes advantage of that huge playing are we have mentioned. There is the ability to create your own races and place the start, finish and all the checkpoints around the terrain and then use the track to race online. Its this that leaves to game open for enthusiasts to start building content but what it lacks is the ability to upload them to a sharing system which would open the flood gates for extra tracks and allow gamers to be as creative as they like. You can store up to 10 tracks locally on your system but we would have really liked to see something that enabled us to see what other players were creating and even the ability to set target times to beat and user created online challenges would have been more than welcome.

On the whole FUEL is a very entertaining title but there are just too many missing pieces of the jigsaw, the poor AI leaves a lack of challenge during racing and the huge playing area we have talked about so much serves no real purpose other than the World Record it holds. The smaller races is were the fun really is and the handling characteristics of the customisable vehicles around these tracks is great, hopefully Codemasters will somehow add in the ability to upload and exchange tracks and then we may be able to unleash the real game that is currently hiding in a playing area of 5,560 square miles.

Lost Gamer Verdict: 7/10