But what's the use in having a playing field the size of East Timor if the cars handle like luggage trolleys? We know the geography, the geometry and the meteorology of FUEL, but what about the chemistry? That's precisely the reason Codemasters offered to let us run amok in FUEL'S world, to get some real hands-on time with the game. Though there are no loading times when travelling between them, the gigantic map is split into around 15 zones, each containing events. Career events progress the storyline, Challenge events are prescribed races with pre-determined rules, and Vista Points are collectable location markers perched atop FUEL'S most aesthetically pleasing views.
New vehicle liveries, bonus cars and storm-chasing doppler trucks are available to find too. Discovering a zone's various points of interest rewards you with stars, collect enough and they'll unlock a new zone -though unlocking in this case purely means making that zone's events available to play, as the entire map is open from the outset.
FUEL'S world plays out in real-time too: a day lasts 12 minutes, though when it comes to traversing the huge distances between events you can make use of handy helipads dotted about the place. Chinooks then drop you off at starting lines. If you prefer, and why not in a world this intriguing, you can follow your compass to nearby events.
Playing through a few races gave a feel for how the game handles. Quad bikes and scramblers are where FUEL excels, as its go-anywhere, off-road ethos is really allowed to shine.
The road cars however, felt restrictive, their handling felt floatier than their twowheeled counterparts and the physics were unconvincing, especially when they were compared to Codemasters' other racing games.
Many races bunch checkpoints close together to keep you on the exact route the developers had intended, while only a few of the races we saw spread their checkpoints far apart enough to really allow you tear your own path through the world. One race in particular saw me booting my bike off the beaten path to carve a straight line to the next checkpoint, only to find myself in a deeply forested area.
Turning hard in the mud and travelling sideways with my elbow almost touching the ground, I threaded the bike through a small gap between the ground and a fallen tree trunk, righting myself just in time to rejoin the race in pole position.
More of the game's events will hopefully cater to this idea of "risk and reward",. The cars need to be sorted out too, as at this point they're simply not as much fun to drive as the motorbikes. And while we're airing gripes, the tornado and storm effects, while beautiful, result in scripted carnage such as electricity pylons falling conveniently into the road in front of you.
A world this impressive needs a bit more of a dynamic edge to it. Still, a world the size of the Lambayeque Region of Peru yes, the area known for its rich Chimu and Moche historical past is nothing to be scoffed at. We'll have a full review next issue, unless something goes dreadfully wrong in Asobo's office. If You Know anything about FUEL, you'll know exactly what you want to do first: grab a buggy and strike out north until you can't head north any more.
You'll be forgiven for forgetting how many thousands of square kilometres the racer is supposed to have crammed into it, as Asobo themselves kept changing the numbers while everybody else did their maths wrong and started thinking it had a playing area greater than the surface of the sun.
If you want to know how big FUEL is, the answer is "big enough". You'll get bored of trekking steadily towards the edge of the map before you get anywhere close to it. FUEL is so big that limits cease to matter. And if you're wondering how big that is, I've just looked it up.
It's 14,km2, which is a square km wide, about 0. Very big. Weather plays a part in that too, any given bit of that map can be subjected to torrential storms, blinding snowfall and winding tornados which tear up scenery and bring it crashing down onto the track in front of you.
In races, particularly the longer ones with widely spaced checkpoints, it allows you to meaningfully choose your own path through the world. Either you'll want to stick to the decrepit remains of the asphalted primary roads, or when those roads inevitably stop leading you directly to your destination, pull away into one of the millions of back roads and dirt tracks that realistically criss-cross the landscape and take a more direct route instead.
A wide roster of vehicles can be purchased, and canny vehicle selection based on the sort of terrain you'll be racing on is touted as the key to success. Superbikes, for example, bolt down highways, but scream in pain the second they touch mud and refuse to budge. Conversely, buggies and quads are typically slow, but have the traction to go cross-country when required.
In theory it's brilliant, and when it works as intended FUEL is a uniquely exciting racer. Blasting down a steep cliff face in a rickety buggy towards a 10 mile-wide lake, dodging rocky outcrops as the waterline creeps slowly towards you is easily one of the most exhilarating moments of any racer. The scale on show is simply incredible: draw distances are unfathomably huge, and every point on the horizon can have a car pointed at it and subsequently be arrived at, even if it takes an hour.
So that's fantastic. Well done Asobo! You guys certainly deserve this big congratulatory party with cake and balloons and party poppers, and a midget version of Ann Widdecombe who goes around the room on a tiny locomotive letting people snort cocaine off her arse.
But hold on! Stop the celebrations! Somebody's leaping out of the giant cake! And they're shooting everybody in their faces!
Oh dear, now everybody's either dead or writhing in agony as their life slides out of them, and it's all because Asobo didn't give due attention to Rubbish Al and Shite Physics. And there's cake everywhere. You know when someone is driven to a tortuous jumping-out-during-a-party metaphor that something is deeply wrong. And sadly there is. Structurally FUEL doesn't play to its established strengths, and you'll spend little time actually exploring the expansive world Asobo have created and more time in the menu screen, ticking off rudimentary challenges in a way not terribly unlike a normal and unremarkable off-road racer.
In the races themselves, losing sight of the lead vehicles and allowing them to fall out of rendering distance lets the race Al unfairly propel them steadily towards victory. I've had to restart many races upon noticing that the two race leaders were a good mile ahead of me, and that the gap was widening thanks. On the highest difficulty setting you'll be thumped time and time again, and on the mid-setting you'll often find your opponents little challenge.
Margins of victory are magnified hugely by the distances you race, and you'll rarely encounter anything close to a photo finish. When you can see the other racers, they're generally good sport apart from the occasional hiccup - getting stuck on inclines only to receive magical boosts , driving headlong into abandoned vehicles, that sort of outrageousness.
Contact with them feels unsettlingly unpredictable, as does contact with anything other than the floor beneath your wheels. So we move on to the physics, which are floaty and unconvincing in all but the buggies. FUEL feels solid enough when you're not doing anything unusual, but collisions with roadside furniture and jutty-out bits of terrain highlight a real problem with the handling.
At times you'll be launched skywards, or fall foul of the cruddy damage meter that decides like some strict parent whether or not you've had enough damage for one day and rudely resets your car to the track. If you're lucky, it'll be pointing in roughly the right direction. The road cars are big offenders, feeling to be made of polystyrene and shiny paper - which is appropriate, as that's how they look: garish, chunky and exhaust-pipe laden in an otherwise fantastic looking game.
That FUEL is marred by these problems is a great big puddle of shame, as when things come together the game really does shimmer. The payoff for daring to ride your bike through the dense, charred remains of a pine forest and succeeding, while your opponents stick to the prescribed route and fail, is immensely satisfying. The vistas and scripted weather changes you're treated to during races can be stunning at times, and when you decide to endure the free ride mode before eventually being put off by the lack of anything to do or see in it the previously mentioned sense of bigness about the mountains and valleys rarely ceases to impress.
You'll spend your time with FUEL trying to love it, endlessly probing it from all angles like an awkward virgin, certain there's at least one way in but repeatedly finding yourself rebuked, unsatisfied and frustrated. The head-spinningly massive world is a design feat on paper, but in practice it delivers nothing other than a varied, edgeless backdrop and the ability to plot out mile long marathons, which unfortunately isn't as much fun as it sounds.
FUEL'S not a bad game, but it's fallen short of the incredible open-world racer epic we'd conjured up in our imaginations having had all of those big numbers and square miles thrown at us. Fuel Is Set in a massive world. David Dedaine - the co-founder of Asobo - sets off an aerial cinematic that takes us from one corner of the map to the other.
It sails effortlessly past the point where you think "Jesus, that's big". Then it goes on, until you get that lost feeling you get when you walk with your eyes closed. And still, it goes on, until you're forced to laugh at the sheer dumbfounding enormity of the terrains, the number of distinctive landmarks, and the fact that it's still flying by.
By the time the cinematic had completed the km diagonal journey, I'd involuntarily muttered "Fuck off! But FUEL wasn't always going to be km by km of open-world arcade racing.
At one point, it was going to be five times bigger. With a view distance of 40km, there's always something you can see in the distance to entice you away. Whether that's the searchlights of a. That's part of the reason they brought the landscape down from that original, supermassive plan. So, when someone asks how long it takes to drive from one corner of : the map to the other, the answer is: "We don't know.
We always get distracted. In creating a world of this scope, you can't ask a human to place every tree, and sculpt every square inch of land. A lot of the detail in FUEL'S world has been generated from algorithms - from the roads, to the terrain, to the obstacles that litter the highways.
You're a petrol-head adrenaline junkie, who finds that global warming has turned the world into a giant metal playground. You're collecting fuel, but for no more noble purpose than to unlock more cars and races - seriously, you don't need to worry about a storyline.
Auto Assault tried that path, and look where that ended up. Secondly, you'll be kept in check by the career races. You'll unlock the higher races by earning fuel.
This is earned, with a kind of irony, by winning races. Going for a gold medal requires a knowledge of the map's shortcuts, while going for bronze which means your competitors will be slower, not that you rank third you always have to win to earn the fuel and keep progressing. Whilst Asobo aim to fill their world with spectacle and events, racing games are more instantly suited to MMO-style multiplayer than story-driven games like Grand Theft Auto IV or Oblivion.
The demo allows us to play one full level of the game. This download requires a ZIP compatible compressor. Leticia Sorivella. Antony Peel. Software languages. Author Codemasters. Updated Over a year ago. Last revision More than a year ago. The Sims 2 Create a Sim. Ok We use our own and third-party cookies for advertising, session, analytic, and social network purposes.
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