FUEL (PlayStation 3)

Animations

When you’re on a quad bike or a motorcycle, there’s a nice level of animation on the actual rider or driver. They move pretty well and they’ll randomly do tricks as you get big air, letting you concentrate on the important aspect of racing. The cars are well animated with the right moving parts, nothing to truly complain about here.

Physics

Car handling varies, that’s good. What’s not good is when you crash, there’s a sudden pop-up of the word FUEL, in a nifty kind of cut out and you fail to see the spectacular wreck. BAD developers, give us our automotive carnage! There’s nothing like a sudden FUEL cut-away popping up in your face to pull you out of the immersion of the game in the first place. As for impact physics, there’s some, there’s no damage modelling per-se on the vehicles but they do get a bit banged up and dirty.

AI

It feels like the opponent cars and vehicles have booster rockets, they are able to rocket ahead even on the easier races and dominate you for quite a while. They rarely crash out and if they do, they’re right back in and on your tail like a hyper-bloodhound on hyper-fox hunt day. Either that or they’re driven by road ninjas. I believe they use the so-called rubber-band method, to keep it fresh and challenging. However, at the later stages of the game, fresh becomes frustrating and challenging turns into nightmarish.

Music

This music isn’t my cup of tea, the game needed metal or something. What we do have is fine if you like that sort of repetitive droning in your ear.

Sound

Pretty decent sound design, nothing to write home about but the various vehicles have a different audio feel.

Voice and Dialogue

Not much at all, in fact, not really anything I can say here so I’ll just cut it there.

Multiplayer

FUEL’s online is glitchy and it’s prone to serious lag, drop outs and stutters when you’re racing. I’ve been kicked from a race or two due to those issues and the game is more of the same style as it is in single-player. You can make your own races to share with friends and compete in various themed events, variants of tag and the like. You can free-ride with 16 other players in the massive world.

Out of Gas

FUEL is ambitious and it’s mediocre fun at best. There’s excellent technology behind it, graphically it’s quite nice but could have done with more polish. Though the online when it works redeems it a little, it still fails to engage with a limp-wristed career and lack-lustre rewards. It works great as a Point of Concept demo and perhaps the post-apocalyptic setting was a bad idea, since the game is devoid of life even with 16 players online.

One to rent, unless you’re a hard core racer and want to see the big open world for yourself and determine if it deserves to be in the Guinness Book of Records.