Fuel Review

Gimme Fuel, Gimme Fire

One of the main problems with the cars in Fuel is that when you play the game from the default behind-the-car perspective then you feel like there’s absolutely no connection between you and the vehicle. Instead, Fuel feels exactly as fast and thrilling as piloting a car remotely through an entirely virtual space should be; i.e. not very.

The solution to the problem is admittedly very simple – click the right thumbstick down twice and drive via a bumper-cam instead. The problem with that though is that this view point is pretty much incompatible with the type of terrain, especially given that you’ll never stick with one vehicle type for more than five minutes. The bumper-cam is fine for driving along roads or the open desert, but when you’re skirting a quad-bike through trees or hairpinning a truck cab along a mountain path then you need a sense of spatial awareness that the bumper-cam can’t provide.

Not that you’re in too much danger of losing the race even if you do fly off the suggested course though – and we say suggested because the open world design lets you choose your own routes for each race, just like in Motorstorm. You opponents are all universally conquerable and predictable, often getting stuck on the occasional burnt out vehicles that block off road lanes, and refusing to do anything so bold as try and bash you off the road. Facing foes like that and doing so in an open environment means that if you do veer off track then you can always just regain ground by cutting a corner, knowing that your rivals would never do something so brazen.


Going off-road is one of the more enjoyable things about Fuel and no matter where you go there’s always something to jump off of or crash into, though you’re best advised to do this in the Free Ride mode rather than races unless you have to. The race types themselves cover a fairly broad mix of off and on-road racing though and there are even a few semi-interesting gametypes to spice things up, such as Chase the Chopper. There’s so many of them though that even they eventually get old.

Whatever the event is, chances are that you’ll need to use the GPS guide system to help you navigate through the huge world – especially if you’re in the lead and can’t just follow the crowd. The GPS system is made up of two main elements; a beacon that shows you exactly where the next checkpoint is and a breadcrumb trail of arrows that are always supposed to show you the must direct route. Here’s a word of advice: never follow the arrows. Too many times we’d detour around a tree and the GPS would try to plot a new route for us and settle on one that just had us driving round in circles.


It’s always possible to turn the GPS off admittedly, as long as you don’t mind getting lost, and there are even a selection of events that won’t let you use it all, but it’d be nice if you didn’t always have to switch it on and off just to avoid the idiotic directions. If we really wanted to get bad directions when playing Fuel then we’d just ask Harry to read the map anyway!

Still, there are some redemptive aspects to the game, it has to be said – such as your ability to just jump out to races straight away, unlike similar open world racer Burnout Paradise. Exploring the open world can turn up a lot of new challenges, race and collectible, but you don’t need to go and actually find them all – they can get quite easily auto-detected if you can just get close enough to see them. The one exception to this are the barrels of fuel that litter the levels and which are almost impossible to spot – these you’ll need to actually run over if you want to collect the fuel.

And no, you don’t need to worry about running out of fuel in Fuel. Fuel is just the name of the in-game currency that you’ll use to buy new cars and upgrades, but we’d better start talking about something else before we venture in demotivational territory.

Yo dawg, we heard you like fuel so we put some fuel in your fuel…