Negative Gamer Review: Fuel

Fuel, the latest racing title from Codemasters, the publisher of such respected racing games as Dirt and Grid, was finally released this June after E3. Touted as the largest playing area ever on a console game with 5,000 sq miles of land, lakes, dirt, paths, and roads, Asobo studios has crafted a post-apocalyptic open-world racing game where ‘œFuel’ is the primary commodity racers use to expand their race options and accumulate new vehicles.

Fuel starts the player out in a relatively small portion of the map with few vehicles.  Once wins are recorded in various difficulties, more fuel is accumulated and more sections of the map are opened up.  The vehicles one can purchase with fuel include; motorcycles, quads, rally cars, muscle cars, and monster trucks.  Aside from straight up on and off road racing, there are challenges one should also try because the pay off of fuel for succeeding at the challengies is far more rewarding in the short term.  There are online races as well as a race editor where the player can upload his or her race for the community to have a go at as well.  My experience with this feature was not positive, a point I’ll go into more detail about below.

This game caught the attention of the Guinness Book of World Records for it’s massive playing area, the question is whether Codemasters were able to deliver more than a big backyard and a gimmick. One would think that 5,000 square miles of racing area would mean hours of rich entertainment and racing experiences beyond our wildest dreams!  Right?

Open world? Y-Y-Y-You’re doing it wrong!

2009 has been a bit thin on quality racing games among the consoles so far and many racing fans like myself, have been pinning some hopes on Fuel. Racing simulations like Forza and Gran Turismo are brilliant in their depth and commitment to realism; however, arcade racers allow for a more relaxed approach to racing and also encourage noobs to dip their toes in the genre.  Fuel is definitely in the arcade category.  This is to say that the player does not need to know how best to upgrade components of vehicles; he or she just needs to buy new vehicles when one has enough fuel and has unlocked said vehicles.  This is the system that Codemasters used in Grid, and it worked very well in that game.

Lets be clear that I am not saying that arcade racers are a sub-genre, they aren’t; they simply are a different, less demanding experience that the simulations.  Other Arcade racers like the Burnout series have proven that depth is more than possible with this type of racing game.

In keeping with one of the most annoying game development trends out currently, Fuel leans heavily on its ‘œopen-world’ for the framework that players will interact with the game. While players access races, challenges, and online multiplayer through menus, they can also do so by driving…and driving…and driving further still to reach race starts. Included with this feature set are the occasionally enjoyable challenges that players can use to accrue greater amounts of fuel. Personally I found the “Chopper-Chase” to be the most  enjoyable. It’s a simple challenge where essentially you have to out run a helicopter over land in a particular vehicle.  The early challenges involve just driving straight but in the later maps it gets a bit more challenging.  Not a bad innovation.

However, not only is most of the map locked out until you invest a huge amount of time, once you do unlock areas it is so damn large an area it can take upwards of fifteen minutes, literally, to reach a preferred destination.  It’s ludicrous that we are expected to just drive through dirt and trees for that long to enjoy what was touted as a defining feature of this product.  There are many challenges and races and things to do in the world of Fuel, but the world itself is so massive, that it becomes prohibitive to even bother with the open-world-ness of it.  Just use the menus.

In keeping with another annoying trend in game development, user-generated content, Asobo has  included a race editor with the game. While in theory this sounds like an exciting opportunity for the community to share its creativity with the world, what actually happens is that you are going to end up with an ass-hat who designed a race that actually takes you up a mountain where you won’t get over 12 mph.  This happened to me on my first online match and rather than just drop out I decided to stick it out to see how bad things got.  The race took over 20 minutes to complete, was boring as shit, and the pinhead who designed it was pretty patronizing.

One thing that other, more successful, open world games have in common is great music.  A soundtrack in a racer should be a complement to the racing experience, where energized tunes are going to add to one’s immersion while also contributing to the overall enjoyment.  Here again, the makers of this game have really mis-judged the market.  The music in this game is repetitve and uninspired drivel.  The rock-techno intro music adds nothing and, after you have listened to it twenty times it becomes annoying and takes you out of the experience; you just can’t ignore it anymore.  It burns!  Not really, but I’m sure you get the point that it’s grating. Even the volume of the background music is irritating in that it’s not loud enough to really give you a sense of a commitment to a style, but it’s not soft enough so that you can easily ignore it.  It’s almost as if they intentionally looked for a volume level that would be most ineffective and went that way.

This all looks very familiar…

While these aren’t game breaking complaints, there a couple of other issues I had with Fuel.  The graphics are just not up to scratch.  I don’t care if all of their resources went to the total size of the game’s race area, graphics can be rendered quite beautifully in racing games and what Fuel has presented is at best sub-moderate.  I would give the edge to the look and appearance of Motorstorm:Pacific Rift, which better managed course effects and tracks being altered during a race and had much more attractive lighting and environments.  Though to be fair, Fuel does provide active weather systems as well as time changes.  A course at dusk is noticeably different from the daytime.

Which brings me to another issue, PS3 owners that have Motorstorm Pacific Rift are likely going to notice the troubling similarities between that game and Fuel.  From the graphical style, to the sounds, to the types of races, to even the announcer’s voice-over it’s all way too similar to SCEA’s Motorstorm franchise.  I’m not certain but the actor that did the voice-work for Motorstorm:PR may be the same guy in Fuel.  Even if it wasn’t intentional, Codemasters shouldn’t have greenlit something that is so derivative.  One thing that Fuel did do right was to make me dust off Motorstorm.

Bran in the morning really helps too

While Fuel has passable racing controls and features, its primary issue is that it’s the Kim Kardashian of video games. Like Kardashian, Fuel has a massive rear-end that ultimately isn’t all that interesting once you start fucking around with it. It’s almost as if some executive in a meeting picked a bullet point about large-open-world gaming and made the team focus primarily on that. One thing that they missed about open-world games is that that if you expect your customer to wander around in your open world you need to make it fun to do so. In GTAIV you could drive, walk, or run around for hours in Liberty City just admiring the view or listening to great music. You could even start shooting stuff up and wait for the police for fun and games with guns. In Burnout Paradise, again, you can listen to great music, drive around, do jumps, drive through signs and have a great time doing so without even initiating a single race.

In Fuel though, while the developers have given the player a large number of things to do in the open world, none of them are even remotely interesting. Would you like to drive aimlessly in search of a ‘œVista’ point to ponder the beautiful expanse? Good luck even finding one let alone being remotely interested once you find it. Are you on the search for ‘œRenegade’ vehicles that you can track down to claim? Well, all you have to do is give them a little bump and they just stop and stare at you like a deer on heroin. Would you like to access races and challenges by driving to them rather than simply using the menu system? Call me when you have reached your desired spot, I’ll already have a couple of pints in me by then. Fuel is just too big an area to make open-world game design practical.

Clearly Codemasters has tried to produce a racing title with some accessibility and value for the consumer. The problems arise though because the application of these goals is so meh, and so derivative overall. The controls are reasonably accurate and the difficulty is not prohibitive to new racing game enthusiasts. If you can judge a drift and pick up when to hit the handbrake button you can win many of the races on Rookie level on your first or second try. The online MP is fairly standard, there are some decent challenges to enjoy and you can also upload your own race via the race editor that is included with the game. The editor though is fairly simplistic in that all you are doing is simply setting check points along routes in unlocked sections of the game. The entire time I played Fuel, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was just missing out on playing the better racing games in my collection.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• Did I mention that the open world in this is irrelevant and poorly applied?
• Some of the debris that is supposed to be dust and dirt blowing in your face to replicate an off road racing experience just looks like 8 bit blocks flittering around on-screen.  It looks broken.
• No split screen.  Note to developers: if you are going to produce an arcade racer, in theory you want people have a fun rather than a simulation experience.  Split screen is fun.  Bring it back goddammit!
• Some of the race lengths are just too long.
• The active weather needs to be more, y’know, active.  Time and weather changes occur too rarely during a game session.

You should play this game if…

…you are relatively new to racing games and have not already played Motorstorm: Pacific Rift and Burnout Paradise.

Final Score

An arcade racer with decent controls that forgot that open world games shouldn’t be a chore to play.

(What does this score mean?)