Fuel Review

Developer: Asobo Studio

Publisher: Codemasters

Videogames often draw the most absurd parallels. When you take your first drive in Fuel, the open world racing game from Asobo Studio, you might find yourself thinking of You’ve Been Framed. There’s always a clip of some show-off in that programme on a motorbike or quad, who thinks he can make it up that muddy slope only for his vehicle to tip up indignantly, almost crushing him in the process. In Fuel, that show-off is you, and the hilarity your doing. But right here lies the first problem. The game proudly presents itself as an open world exploration sim as much as it does a standard racer, giving you, it claims, free reign over the vast global-warming terraformed environment of near future North America. To make this huge playing field -the biggest ever seen in a game, around 14,400 square kilometres to be exact- manageable in gameplay terms, Asobo Studio have invented all manner of exploration-curtailing design features. Crashing your vehicle, or ‘totalling’ it if you’re in on the extreme sports lingo, is one of them. Rather than witness your racer fall to his hilarious £250-well earned doom, the game’s screen fades to black and places you back on the land a reasonable distance from where you crashed. Not only does this disjointedly interrupt the supposedly seamless sim-like nature that Fuel champions, but because there’s no recognisable signs of damage to your vehicle as it drives through and is damaged by terrain, it’s very difficult to tell where and when such a feature will be initiated. Obstacles such as trees, cliffs and farm buildings seem to do random amounts of damage to your vehicle, regardless of its bulk or the speed at which you’re driving it at. This means, like ever-popular You’ve Been Framed camcorder celebrities such as the extreme sports show-off, the drunk wedding gran or the over-exited dog at a barbeque, you never really learn from your mistakes. What parts of the environment can and cannot be traversed seem entirely arbitrary, and you’re never sure if your vehicle will withstand you charging through them. As such, you tend to stay clear of these dangerous areas, reticent to explore them rather than encouraged.

This helping hand is also present in the traditional lap racing of Fuel. When you crash -fairly frequently, mind- on an infuriatingly positioned tire or rock, you’ll get the black screen, only to be placed back on the track, back in the race, moments later. Because there’s no real punishment here, racing in these challenges becomes an exercise of brute speed rather than skill. It seems like the developers are compensating for some of the vehicles lack of handling and responsiveness.

The world, while impressive to look at and drive around, is just too big. As has already been said, it’s massive. So massive that it has to be divided up into fifteen or so different sectors, each one easily the size of the entire Far Cry 2 overworld, which was another game with similar driving/exploring pretensions/problems. Another one of Asobo Studio’s compensatory gameplay devices is inherent in how this environment reveals itself to you as you explore it. Points of interest pop up on your real-world radar: huge coloured arrows marking vista points, challenges and collectables. Not only does this foreclose the effect of spontaneous discovery, but it also marks these points of interest prematurely: when they’re so far away from you, so impossible to get to, they may as well not have been highlighted in the first place. Also, changing vehicles on the fly, while intuitive and time saving when tackling multiple types of terrain, breaks down the sense of realism and consistent gameplay that an open world like Fuel should create. There’s even the option to teleport straight to your discovered points of interest, bypassing the whole natural feeling of exploration. The only reason to do it becomes functional: to discover these points on the horizon which you can then fast-track to. It’s almost as if Asobo Studio is admitting that the size of Fuel’s overworld is too big, too unmanageable, and thus they create all these features to streamline the game whilst also unintentionally cutting out your desire to want to explore it unaided. The only truly helpful exploration aid is the GPS feature, where you can mark on the map a point you want to get to, and a series of arrows in-game, in real-time, will guide you there. It can be activated and deactivated with the push of a button, so it never feels intrusive to the gameplay, and you’re always in control of whether it’s there or not.

There are some good aspects of Fuel, however. The overworld is mostly fun to explore, even if its size leads to some aimless driving around, and some searching for something interesting to stumble across. The online multiplayer adds a bit of competition to the gameplay; as always human racers are more fun to race against than robotic computer-controlled ones. You can really challenge each other head-to-head, setting your own races through the environment by marking their start and end points. It’s often fun to see who can set out the craziest run across the rockiest terrain, raising a few of those rib-tickling moments that should be committed to camera and sent in to a certain television clip show.

In the end, Fuel’s biggest selling point also causes it the biggest problem: an environment that is so unique in its size, so desirous to be the biggest yet created, that it’s actually impossible to have any control over it in-game. It’s a nice experiment, but there should be a bumper sticker on the horizon that reads: ‘if you can read this, you sure can’t get to me!’ Perhaps ‘my other car is a teleportation device’, would be another apt one.

Score: Three Stars (Out of Five)

Stuart ‘LizardGenes’ Lindsay