Fuel [PS3]

Codemasters has long been churning out strong racing titles, but recently it has started hitting the big time with releases such as Dirt and Grid. While we eagerly await to see what Dirt 2 has in store for us, we're given Fuel as something to tide us over. Developed by Asobo, with it featuring the biggest environment in any game to date (over 5,000 square miles to explore), tons of unlockables to find and earn, a plethora of different vehicle types and a laundry list of races and events to take part in, the promise is huge.

Unfortunately, Fuel falls short in almost every category, crumbling under its own weight.

The premise of the game is that it's an open-world racer that lets you explore thousands of miles of forests, desert, snow and more. As you drive around you'll discover run-down cars that give you new paint jobs, vista points that give you something pretty to see (and a new place to spawn) and even maverick vehicles that you can run into to add to your garage. As you earn stars (up to three in each race depending on the difficulty), you unlock new camps scattered around the world that feature new races and challenges. Once you're actually in a race, it plays out something like MotorStorm with you manning an ATV, bike, truck, buggy or what have you as you skid and slide around turns and take huge jumps as you make your way to the finish line.

The idea here is good, but like I said, the game just falls apart under this design. One of the biggest issues is that despite the fact that the world is huge, it's boring. There's not really a whole lot to see here outside of what you'd expect from snowy mountaintops, dry plains or tree-filled forests. It's so massive that driving from one place to another can take you over ten minutes, and when all you get is a new coat of paint, that's simply not worth your time.

The immensity of the world is lost on the actual events since you don't actually need to drive to any of them - you can just choose to start them from a list. What's dumb from a presentation standpoint though is that even though you can see them on the overhead map, you can't choose to start them from here. Instead, you need to go the camp's pause screen and choose them from a text list. But, when you want to change camps, it's way easier to do it from the map screen since that gives you info on how many events you've cleared at it. Yes, this is really dumb.

There are more presentation problems associated with the map, unfortunately. There are the aforementioned maverick cars driving around that get flagged on your map, as well as Doppler vehicles that'll show you where stuff is, vista points to "collect" and so on and so forth. When you view the map from the fully zoomed-out view, you get a key as to what everything is. Since you're basically dealing with differently colored dots and arrows, this is important. Unfortunately, once you begin to zoom in at all (and given the game's scope, you can't see anything until you do zoom in quite a bit), the key is replaced with a description of the area you're in. So, once you can see the icons on the map, you have no idea what they are. When you can see the description of what they are, you can't see the actual items on the map anymore. Brilliant.

Once you're in a race, there are multiple issues. Firstly, the AI is really cheap, stupid and poorly implemented. It'll make dumb decisions such as trying to climb a hill that it can't and just sit there with the throttle cranked as it just kicks up dirt for a while. There's no rubber-banding per se, but the way that the game makes things "challenging" is by having the guys at the front of the pack take off at a million miles an hour and then stay ahead for the bulk of the race. Near the end, it'll just slow down a great deal to let you pass on by and win the race. Once you realize that this happens every time, it's not a matter of taking risks to catch up but simply playing it safe and waiting for the computer to let off the accelerator and let you take your place on the podium.