Fuel Review

Gimme Conclusion

Graphically speaking, Fuel commits one other sin – a big and totally unforgivable one considering that it’s on an completely closed platform; unstable frame rate.

The first time we booted up Fuel we were pretty disgusted with the in-game performance, with the terrain jerking past in jumps rather than drifting smoothly. Considering the speed that we were meant to be travelling at and the jumps that we were occasionally hitting the effect wasn’t entirely unlike jumping on a trampoline during an earthquake.

Wondering if the problem was possibly a hardware one we turned the PlayStation 3 off and, after giving it some time to cool off, booted it back and gave the game another try. Sure enough, the gameplay was back at the expected 60 frames per second, though the experience was still marred by the pop-up and coarse fabric trousers.

After little more than an hour or two of gameplay though the frame rate again began to stutter, though it wasn’t constant as it had been before. Not that regularity really matters; the hardware in a console is fixed and immovable, so we don’t think we’re being greedy or unreasonable when we demand a smooth frame rate from a console game.


As well as being frustrated by the frame rate drops, we were occasionally left quite confused by Fuel and some of the design decisions that the developers seem to have made – especially with the way that the vehicles handle. As we said before, Fuel isn’t all that challenging and really all you have to do is hold down the accelerator and just try to steer. It doesn’t even matter if you stick to the track that closely and we’ve literally completed entire races with one hand – which is quite a feat with the PS3 controller, to be honest.

There’s nothing wrong with that on its own, especially when you can push the difficulty a bit higher if you really think it’s a huge problem, but sometimes it feels like Codemasters has gone really out of its way to make Fuel almost unnecessarily easy.

Nowhere is that sentiment more clear than with the tricks system – though we use the word ‘system’ in the loosest possible sense. What it really translates to as far as Fuel is concerned is ‘sometimes your character will just decide to bust a move’. You apparently have no control of it, with our avatar pulling off loads of moves without any provocation or button pressing at all on our behalf.


One minute you’re flying through the air, the next you’re swinging your legs out and spinning in mid-air, always getting back into a safe position just before you land. It’s an idea which completely removes any sense of player involvement and takes an idea which otherwise would have been a lot of fun and meshed quite well with the game, turning it into a pointless distraction. We hate it, unilaterally.

Which is a shame, to be honest, because Fuel isn’t an utterly bad game despite our somewhat negative write-up. There are parts of it which are actually quite good and, no matter what faults we or anyone else pick with the camera, the controls or the handling, the fact is that there’s still an awful lot of fun to be had from launching yourself off a mountain on a dirt-bike, even if you can’t control the tricks.

Still, the type of mindless fun that can be had from Fuel isn’t unique, nor is it particularly noteworthy. At the end of the day, Fuel may be kind of enjoyable – but it doesn’t offer the level or type of satisfaction that we’d be willing to pay full price for, especially considering how expensive console games are these days.

Score Guide