At a glance...

Fuel review

Fuel is Codemasters' latest single-word racing game, following on from the likes of (Colin McRae) Dirt and (Race Driver) Grid. Except there's one key difference with Fuel, and that is that the game is not developed by one of Codemasters' own studios, instead it was produced by French dev house Asobo Studio, creators of the Disney Pixar Cars and Ratatouille games for THQ. Following confirmation from Guinness World Records we already know that Fuel has the largest playable area out there, but is there much to do, and how much fun is it?

Well, let's look at what Fuel is. It's an open-world off-road racing game, looking to follow in the footsteps (or is that tire marks?) of Burnout Paradise, with a bit of Motorstorm thrown into the mix. Offering up free roaming gameplay it aims to be the off-road equivalent of the city environment of Burnout Paradise, with various events scattered across the landscape. Of course, the actual size of the playing area is much greater than in Criterion's game, as the record shows, and yet you get the impression there is less to do. There are a large number of events, but they are scattered across such a vast area that most of the time you can't be bothered to spend the time driving between them as it takes so long, instead turning to the menus to load up the next one. And doesn't that kind of miss the point of an open-world racer? Burnout Paradise isn't just a fun game because of the events themselves, but because you could have a good time driving between, weaving in an out of traffic, causing crashes, and discovering new events. In Fuel you have long, almost-empty roads with only the occasional truck passing by, and large, barren landscapes, devoid of any creatures, natural or mechanical. It may fit in well with the game's post-apocalyptic backdrop, but that doesn't make it enjoyable. There are events and things like liveries to discover, but if you can easily skip to the events and don't care about the other pickups, then there's really no need to spend lots of time exploring. The major issue of having to resort to the menus is the loading screen that results. If you're in the open world it does a good job of streaming in the landscape as you play so you don't see a loading screen until you start an event, but from the menus the game needs to load the landscape in each, resulting in lots of not-particularly-short sections of loading. You'll probably become a bit too familiar with the screen and its background music after quite a short time.

The comparison to Motorstorm wasn't because it is another off-road racer. Motorstorm is an off-road game that provides you with a whole variety of vehicles to race, from bikes to trucks. Fuel aims to do the same, with a similar variety on offer here. However, instead of unlocking vehicles through wins, you instead use the "fuel" you earn from race victories to pick up your new ride. Obviously you need a vehicle of the right class before a race to take part, but if you've been going from race to race you should have enough fuel to pick up at least the basic machine required. Fuel also follows Motorstorm by not only giving you different classes of races, but also mixes it up, with bikes going against large vehicles, with each of their advantages and disadvantages balancing things out. It's all about the route you take. The handling of the vehicles, however, isn't quite as a tight as in Motorstorm. You'll find the vehicles to be floating around a little too much, and then there's times when you just have to put up with the slog of going up a steep hill in the middle of a race. The handling variety from the range of vehicles on offer isn't as great as it could be, and the weather doesn't have as much effect as might be expect, but there's certainly nothing fundamentally wrong here.

In fact, it can even be said that the racing is actually rather enjoyable. In general, anyway. There are some events which become a bit frustrating, particularly as your race can be quickly over thanks to a stray rock or unavoidable tree. Or if you narrowly miss going between the checkpoint poles. Or if you tumble down a cliff. Of course, these things are to be expected, races are competitions of skill, but with unpredictable surfaces you haven't seen before it does become annoying when you know you can't recover from the inevitable error. Part of the reason for this is the game's requirement for you to win the race. Every time. There's no prizes for third or even second - it's first or nothing. That made more sense on the roads of Burnout Paradise, where failure was more down to your inability to avoid traffic, and every set of traffic lights offers a new event to take part in. In Fuel, however, failure can be the result of the environment as much as your own mistakes, and while there is an ability to restart a race, choosing to do so results in another one of those long loading screens. Want to move down to a lower difficulty? Well, you're two loading screens away, because there is a strange need to return to the race menu to do this. Another issue is the GPS system; designed as a way of navigating the myriad of roads that feature in Fuel, it works just like a real satellite navigation system, in fact not only will it direct you to the next checkpoint along the roads, but it will sometimes send you down a less than optimum route. Sometimes it sticks too heavily to roads that it will make you miss the obvious shortcut that all your AI competitors are well aware of (and you'll only notice when it's too late), and sometimes it tries too hard to send you on the most direct route, missing the nearby minor road that would let you travel though at about twice the speed you were going over the rocky terrain. So the GPS is a bit rubbish, but we are steering too much away from an important thing here; when things aren't going wrong, the racing is rather enjoyable, an important part in all racing games.

Another important part of what Fuel does right is the way it uses those vast areas. While the areas may be sparse, it did offer Asobo Studio an opportunity to provide a lot of variety to the racing. Landscapes change considerably and each race is different, often visiting parts of the world you'll only see again if you drive there in free ride mode. Even with a variety of routes, Motorstorm saw you repeat sections across tracks, but here the experience can be unique each time. Of course, these tracks vary in quality, with some proving frustrating and others rather satisfying, but that's to be expected with the sheer number of them in the game. If you want more, then the game also throws in a race editor, which allows you to place your own checkpoints. You're limited to roads, and it lacks any options such as limited vehicle class, but it seems to work, and you just have to be aware that due to the size of the map the checkpoints which may look close together could be at least 10 minutes apart. Aside from races the game also offers a range of challenges, such as beating a target time, or chasing a helicopter across a map. The other takes away the GPS and is all about finding the quickest route without really knowing where you're heading. The only issue with this is that the helicopter always seems to slow just before the end, completely without explanation, so that it can be hard to tell if you're failing or in fact you're going to suddenly win at the last moment. Grouping together all the races and challenges are the game's camps, the headquarters for different areas of the overall map. These are unlocked as you complete events and can be reached by driving right up to the front door or just skipping to them from the menus.

Visually Fuel manages to convey the landscape and the weather conditions that accompany the events rather well. Despite the large area on-screen, the draw distances are impressive, streaming in content smoothly when you manage to avoid those pesky loading screens. The detail is fairly good, but a bit behind some of the stuff we've seen in this generation's racing games, particularly off-road titles. Framerate does suffer a bit, though not to any race-damaging extent, but it appears to have been the only major casualty of pulling off such an enormous world.

Just like all modern racing games, Fuel packs in online multiplayer functionality, following the Burnout Paradise route of offering an "online free ride" mode which lets you travel across the world at the same time as others, so you'll see human-controlled vehicles on the roads (and off them) as well as the computer-guided ones. It goes some way towards making up for that empty atmosphere mentioned earlier, but whether it's a limitation of the game or down to the number of people in the community who are using the mode, you'll never really see that many people around when it's enabled. Having to enable it yourself has probably limited the mode somewhat, and it's strange that's it's not enabled by default (at least/even after some warning prompt) to follow the Test Drive: Unlimited model. There also doesn't seem to be any particular structure to follow when in the mode either, with the events available only forming part of offline play. However, if you get together with some friends you can find your own fun, seeking out the game's vista points and liveries, and this is likely something that people looking for a free-roaming online racer are in search of. If you're looking for a bit more to do online then there is a separate racing option, allowing you to race on any of the game's own tracks, or you can play with your own creations, resulting in some of the craziest online racing I've ever seen. Unfortunately, as with other Codemasters racing games this generation multiplayer is limited to online action, with no split-screen mode available.

Ratings

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