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Give me fuel, give me fire, give me...a different game to play.
Please? It’s Fuel for the Xbox 360.
You might expect this game to be pretty awesome. It’s got some really impressive technology,
it’s got a massive game world...it’s from the publisher that brought you racers like
Dirt and Grid. Codemasters always delivers quality racers, and they’ve packed a lot
of good stuff under this one’s hood.
Except for fun.
Released back in 2009 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, Fuel is a racer with a specific
goal...that being to give you the biggest freaking racing environments ever. There are
thousands of square miles of meadows, mountains, marshes...all there for your driving enjoyment.
It’s an open world racer that sets you loose in these massive places...and then tells you
to go nuts.
So you drive around these environments and sort of unlock the game as you go. Stumble
across a broken down vehicle, and you might unlock new options for your vehicle. You might
even find ones to add to your garage. There are challenges you might find...and it’s
all there, scattered across these huge worlds.
Separated by, like, a million miles of boredom.
And that’s sort of the problem with Fuel. It’s a really cool idea to have these huge
environments to just drive around in...but it has what I call Wind Waker Syndrome, meaning
that traversing vast areas of nothing is always less cool in practice than concept.
Fortunately, you can just choose the main events from a list. I think. This is another
problem with Fuel. Its menus are some of the most clunky and convoluted I’ve ever seen.
Absolutely nothing intuitive about them.
Another weird thing is that...the game just lets you win. You can be in last place for
much of the race, but suddenly pass everyone on the final lap and steal the win. Or maybe
steal isn’t the best word, because it feels like it’s just given to you.
Of course, given how loose and slide-y the controls are, maybe that’s a good thing.
Fuel is an awesome concept with some genuinely cool tech, but frankly, dynamic weather systems
don’t do much for me when the game itself isn’t any fun. Serious racing fans might
enjoy its ideas, but otherwise, this is Fuel you won’t want to pump.