After boasts of extreme weather, extreme driving and ‘ultimate’ sandboxes, Fuel has turned out a far more pedestrian affair than we’d expected but, weirdly, this also turns out to be one of its greatest strengths.

While its various racing modes create more-than-adequate imitations of Pure’s ATV off-roading, Baja’s dune buggy madness and MotorStorm’s insane on-road/off-road rally stuff, it’s the way it all comes together in a seamless (well, almost, anyway) open-world structure that gives Fuel its charm.

Unfortunately, while we’d always been promised a desolate futurescape packed with mad weather and stunning natural scenery, it never turned out that way.
First, to the weather. It’s used fairly effectively as a scripted process for individual races, so every time you select a certain career race with bikes, for example, it’ll always rain, turning the dirt track into more of a wade through a large amount of splashing mud (which, incidentally, adheres to all vehicles in a messy and entertaining way). And, of course, there’s those famous tornado races, which are genuinely scary and work extremely well. But when you’re just meandering around the world, weather changes just don’t seem to happen very often – if at all – in your average hour’s play. This enables you to toddle around this ginormous 5,000-square-mile area unimpeded by the elements, scaling mountains in big cars, racing downhill through forests on a stunt bike, or teetering your way up mountains on a crazy Fourties motorbike with a superfluous sidecar.

Actually, we should say, you’re almost unimpeded by the elements. Unfortunately, the full day/night cycle, which feels to us like it’s tacked-on to pad out the feature list, actually stops you doing anything because it’s so dark. Plus your vehicles have such weak headlights that attempting to travel anywhere by the scant light of the moon will result in falling in lots of lakes or off the side of massive craters. It’s a shame that, eventually, we’d just park up somewhere and wait for the sun to come up, which is a little bit too much like real life to be enjoyable. Especially as there’s no ‘pitch tent and have a singalong’ option. Mind you, in real life, the night lasts more than one-and-a-half minutes, too.

Anyway, the world, at a basic level, is still masses of fun, and this is largely because Fuel never attempts to take itself even remotely seriously. Even though the environment has all the physical realisation and realism of the American countryside (bar the enormous impact crater in the middle), you can do everything you shouldn’t be able to do to make it more fun to run around in.

You can swap any of the vehicles you own completely on the fly, switching from a bike to a monster truck cab in mid-movement with no complaints. It’s illogical, but entertaining to build up a stable of vehicles to cover any environmental eventuality, especially as they’re all so idiosyncratic in their design, yet fairly customisable with paintjobs and decals. Again, throwing realism out of the window and drawing more on the dystopian future theme of the game, these vehicles are all Mad Max-style cut-and-shuts called things like ‘The Dominator’, with unlikely designs such as the aforementioned sidecar bike. There are also ATVs with bizarrely thin wheel configurations and truck cabs that should clearly roll, but don’t.

… continued