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Genre: Racing Publisher: Codemasters Developer: Asobo Studio Players: 1-8

By Keith B (26th Jun 2009)

Oh, Codemasters, what have you done? HellBored Towers often ignites at the mention of a new Codies-published racing game, but alas, like everything in life, the good times have come to an end. What could have been awesome is merely mundane, and while the sheer depth of racing options will reward those who don’t tend to play many racing titles, anyone who has even tinkered in the genre will be upset at some of the key faults in Fuel.

From the outset things are bleak. There is little or no explanation given as to why you’re racing in this massive region, other than some natural disaster has hit and the place in uninhabited. You’ve no idea who you are either, just some random who has dropped in with a vehicle for some off road fun.

The biggest plaudits go to the game world itself, which spans an apparent 14,000 square kilometres, and provides everything from dusty dunes to forests both green and crisp and, in other areas, ravaged by bushfires. Vista points scattered across the world (sort of collectable, we’ll come back to these later) encourage the player to drive to the spots and take in the wonderful, eh, vistas on offer across the bay and what have you.

The massive number of races on offer, mentioned above, is also impressive. Check these: 70 career races and 190 challenges. That makes 260 events you can dominate which by all accounts is commendable.

There are 75 vehicles to get your hands on, spread across numerous categories including bikes, quads, trucks, SUVs and muscle cars. They bear practically no resemblance to anything real though, looking like they were lifted straight out of Mad Max, which doesn’t do much for making you ponder the pros and cons of each before a race.

And collectables, whew, there are plenty of those too. Vista points, liveries for your vehicles, the list stretches into the many hundreds of items you can garner while zipping about over the landscape, presuming you’ll actually want to drive through said landscape at all.

The game looks good, for the most part. Except that the things you can drive into while mid-race are often impossible to see because everything adopts a brown colour and things don’t pop into view from far enough away. Just as I sat down to write this I was leading a race on a bike when bam, not only knocked off but totalled the bike – on something I couldn’t see, while I was driving down an actual road, not in the dirt. So let me take you back across the main issues I have with this that have all come from only a few hours of play.



The physics are simply awful. Driving requires practically no skill whatsoever, because the vehicles don’t handle in any way like they should. You can hit a bend at 130mph on a bike, slam on the brakes mid-bend and come rocketing out of the other side like you’re on tracks. For a game that offers so much off road play, most of the vehicles are inherently shit when you take them into the bush. Again, they handle nothing like they should (and not that it makes me an expert, but I’ve been in a Toyota Corolla WRC car smashing through a forest at close to full speed). It’s simply no fun to do in Fuel because you’ll end up driving at 30kph colliding with things you can barely see.

I think this says it all: the first game that sprung to mind when I started up Fuel was...get ready for this...Carmageddon, the ancient PC title that wasn’t very PC. That’s what this is like, playing a game that was clunky but fun a decade ago, although this isn’t much fun.

In a strange twist, for all the options with racing, there are none you can do with your vehicles. The only sorts of tweaks you can make are cosmetic to both your vehicle and rider. And talking of the rider, in a blatant attempt to recreate the feeling that celebrated racer Pure managed, when on an ATV or bike your rider will, when gliding through the air, try and pull off stunt moves. They have no bearing on the game and you can’t control them, so it really is just to make you think you’re playing Pure. Well, remember those moments in Pure when the ground just fell away and you were pirouetting through the air, banging out stunts and twists before landing gracefully and boosting onto the next jump? Yeah? Well nothing like that happens in Fuel.



The list of problems doesn’t end there. The next biggest turn off is the simply atrocious loading times. Yes, yes, yes, the game world is huge, I get it. But why does it have to load for so long every time I restart a race? I’m talking 60 or more seconds to restart a race because the gammy physics have sent you to your doom. Shouldn’t the race be loaded already?

The GPS, such an essential item when traversing the world, is incredibly shonky. It never seems to be on your side, and often points you in one direction then another then back again all in the space of nanoseconds, distracting you from driving.

Shall we look at the audio? The massive load times are accompanied by one (only one) audio track, some mild drums and guitar work. I think there may have been another track but I believe I only heard it once in the three hours of loading screens I stared at. Even this makes you roll your eyes upwards as the loading causes it to go wonky just about every time. Or then there’s the races you’ll run where your vehicle makes no noise. It’s eerie being on a dirt bike scrambling through a forest and only hearing the wind ruffling your hair and the tyres flattening the grass.



In another strange design trick, the night driving is almost impossible because it’s so, well, dark. Trying to see brown things jutting out of the ground in almost zero visibility is a joke, and so too is the integration of the races into this day/night cycle. You can enter a race as it turns dark, only to have the race run in glorious sunshine, to return to the dead of night if you go back to free roam, serving to make you feel detached from the whole thing. Weather effects are cool but not enough to salvage the world.

And all of the above is a crying shame, because if the massive game world and plethora of races and things to do were housed in something with proper physics and some reference to the real world, we would have loved it. Unfortunately, Codemasters have published a shambles of a game, so we’ll spend our time playing GRiD and waiting for Dirt 2.

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