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While the GPS system may not always show you the fastest way to your objective, it is the safest, and for most part, works quite well during races. The inadequacies of the GPS system are however exposed in free-roam mode. You can place a waypoint anywhere on the map and the GPS system is supposed to guide you there, but very often it takes the longest route and usually sticks to the highways, even with much shorter off-road alternatives at hand. I’ve also had the GPS system direct me into a suicidal dive straight into a lake several times.
But in a massive open world such as this, something is better than nothing, and you will make use of the GPS navigation a lot to get to some of the game’s side events and collectibles. Besides career races, there are also other events for you to enter into to earn fuel. These side events as well as the career events can be accessed directly from your pause menu and you could potentially complete the entire career without once entering free-roam. While some might argue that this invalidates the open-world approach that is the game’s hook, expecting anyone to drive around this humongous world – and I really cannot stress enough how massive it is – is extremely unrealistic.
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Events mostly consist of checkpoint races, although you will also occasionally have lapped races, elimination races, and chase missions. A lot was made of how storms and tornadoes would affect gameplay in Fuel. In reality however, the effect of tornadoes during races is mostly superficial. They never toss you around like I had hoped. Instead, they intimidate with their sights and sounds and kick up a lot of dirt to hinder visibility. They also trigger a few set pieces such as bringing down cell towers across the road and tossing vehicles and other objects in your direction. While that may surprise you the first few times you see it, you’ll soon find that they are designed not to take you out as long as you stay on course. On the whole, these weather effects don’t really affect the behavior of the track or the car. The only change is in the visibility and these effects only serve as distractions from the task at hand, which, while a little anti-climactic, is still a neat addition.
While the game lets you enter events through the pause menu, it also gives you enough reasons to free roam as well. For starters, winning career events unlocks Mavericks. These are cars (which would otherwise cost you lots of fuel) that you can acquire by simply chasing them down and crashing into them. There are also collectible vehicle liveries strewn around for you to collect. Vista points are locations that give you a stunning view of the environment and are usually placed on high ground. Visiting a vista point also makes it a spawn point and you can transport yourself to a visited vista point from anywhere on the map. You also have helipads scattered around the map that serve the same purpose.
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Although collectibles and vista points have to be discovered by driving around, advancing in your career will hand you a short cut by unlocking doppler trucks. Chasing down these doppler trucks will display the locations of all vista points and collectibles in that area on your map without having to explore them yourself. Suffice to say that this is a huge game and unlocking every area, completing the career races and side events, and finding all collectibles and vista points will take you well over 20 hours. And that’s after using every helipad and vista point to reduce your traveling time. If you choose to do it the hard way and drive around everywhere, I cannot even imagine how long it would take, let alone put a number on it.
Outside the career, you can also create your own races, with your own custom routes and checkpoints, both offline and online. But in my experience, it’s very hard to come up with race layouts as challenging and fun as those that have been created by the developers for us. One fault in the track design and layouts is that despite such an open space, the game doesn’t give you any obvious alternate paths, like an optional elevated cliff or a fork in the road, something the MotorStorm games have excelled at. It’s all a little too flat. Unfortunately in the three-four times that I’ve tried playing Fuel online, I was unable to find any players. You can thank the unfairly harsh reviews elsewhere for that.
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The game’s presentation doesn’t really shine in any one individual area, but is more a sum of its parts. Menus are basic and functional, the car models are just about average, textures are extremely low resolution and there is a lot of texture and object pop-in in the environment. But driving around in this world and looking at everything that surrounds you, you can’t help but be impressed with the entire package. The lighting too impresses, but if only the day and night transitions weren’t so frequent. Load times aren’t that long, but a dull loading screen and the same repetitive music do make it feel that way.
Being an open-world racing game that wants you to spend a lot of time just driving around by yourself, a selection of radio stations would have been a nice addition, but instead, you’re treated to a mediocre soundtrack that is a mix of techno and rock. Vehicle sounds also lack the punch, and the change in sound effects as you move from one road surface to another also isn’t as pronounced as it should be.
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Conclusion
If you approach Fuel as an out-and-out open-world racer like Burnout Paradise, you’ll get fed up of it within minutes because you’ll have to drive a lot to get from one event to the next. But if you play through the events from the menus, while free-roaming occasionally for collectibles and unlockables, you will really start to enjoy it, without missing out on the beautiful and varied environments. Asobo have done very well to create this massive world and, more importantly, make it fun to drive around in. If only they had worked on the vehicle controls with as much dedication, it might well have turned into the game that many were expecting. Still, it’s a fun game and definitely has its moment, but with better off-roading alternatives like MotorStorm: Pacific Rift and Pure already available, Fuel is a very hard sell.
(+) Massive game world with varying environments and terrain
(+) Plenty of events, collectibles, and unlockables
(+) Option to enter events without free-roaming
(-) Poor vehicle handling
(-) Frustrating camera issues; no alternate camera angles
(-) Indifferent AI; poorly implemented catch-up system
Title: Fuel
Developer/Publisher: Asobo Studio/Codemasters
Genre: Racing
Rating: 7+
Platforms: PS3 (Rs 2,499), Xbox 360 (Rs 2,499), PC (Rs 999)
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