Review: FUEL

I don't think I've been annoyed more by a game for quite a long time. Fuel isn't a good game, it's a pretty poor one, but it seems lots of effort has gone into ruining what should have been a very strong title.

There are three main reasons FUEL fails abysmally. The first is technical - low-res distant textures and a poor frame-rate take away some of the beauty of the game.

The second is down to choices by the developer - decisions to cheat the player in terms of AI physics and catch-up logic.

Finally the game's misplaced ambition in trying to create such a huge play area has meant gameplay has suffered.

Gimme Fuel

Here we are in a dystopian future where there's a shortage of fuel, yet at the same time there's so much of it that the stuff becomes a prize for winning races. And if you didn't run those races why would you need all that fuel? There's very little evidence of a shortage, every mile or so you'll find stacks of oil drums dotted around. There's so much of the stuff oil drums have replaced sheep in the rural idyll.

The huge play area is a technical marvel but not really one that was actually needed. Being fun to play would be a better selling point than the world's biggest play area. And let's be honest, Guinness generously took a blind eye to games such as Ace Combat and Flight Simulator X when it dished out the award.

A better selling point would be that the races in Fuel were fun. But they aren't. The AI doesn't seem to have to cope with the physical problems of the world that you do, it will corner in a manner you can only dream of. There will be events where you can't use a certain vehicle - but the AI can. Other times you'll engage in what we're told is one of the main points of Fuel - to find your own shortcuts to victory - only to find the rubber-band cheating AI has made such a diversion completely pointless.

Most events leave you feeling cheated, cheated by the AI, cheated by the physics and cheated by having to come first in a series of often cruelly hard events to progress.

When the sun comes out

Sometimes though that is forgotten, the sun comes out and you find yourself exploring the hills, looking out over grand vistas. These are the times Fuel is at its best.

Alas the game doesn't often look this good. The developer has created a beautiful world and ensured you very seldom see the beauty thanks to persisant bad weather, an annoying long night-time and possibly one of the ugliest additions to a game every made. I speak of the intrustive ugly ugly ugly black vignette added to the screen. So annoying is this graphical blight that I'd quite happily come back and add a couple of points to the game's score if the developer patched out the vignette. Not only is it ugly, but it also mimics a problem I have with my eyes - thanks for making that worse in this game folks.

The frame rate is never anything to write home about but that doesn't feel like it matters too much - the tearing is much worse than any frame rate issues.

A Crying Shame

Here Codemasters merely publishes rather than develops but all the usual Codemasters traits are here - the over the top post-processing the poor vehicle handling.

The development Fuel comes across as a ship that no-one had the bravery to steer correctly. There's no doubt that the basis of the game and some of the technical underpinnings are very impressive indeed. A convincing world has been created and it would have been lots of fun to play with it.

But along the way decisions were made to cheat the player and in doing so this is one racer robbed of most of its fun. That really is a crying shame. There's a huge game here that most won't every investigate because you'll be too bored or annoyed before you've ever seen half of the map. Or too fed up of trying to get multiplayer working.

There are enough glimpses at something special underneath to hope that we do get a sequel - something that address the first game's myriad problems - but Fuel is one racer I really couldn't recommend to you in its current state.