Joystiq hands-on: FUEL
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As the newest racing franchise from Codemasters, FUEL has a lot to live up to. Namely the pedigree of the publisher's two other racers this generation, the stellar DiRT and GRID. Its premise is grandiose: allow players to race on order of 5,000 square miles of open world in a variety of vehicles, rancing from dune buggies and roadsters to dirt bikes and monster trucks. It's obvious from playing the game that its developer, Asobo Studio, has the big picture covered; everything else is all over the map.
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Created not by the internal racing team at Codemasters behind for DiRT and GRID, FUEL is the first racer from Asobo Studio, a developer responsible for a number of licensed titles, notably the last-gen tie-ins Ratatouille, WALL-E and The Mummy. It runs on a proprietary engine -- not, as might be expected, the technology used by Codemasters proper.
The game looks nice in alpha form, especially for a title that offers a good amount of visible detail reaching out 20 miles in all directions. We didn't get to see any of the dramatic weather effects present in the first trailer for the game or screenshots, though. Save for patches of burnt forest, the demo build didn't offer any sense of a world ravaged by dramatic climate change.
Over the course of three checkpoint-based races -- sort of an off-road Midnight Club -- we took the controls of a buggy and two different dirt bikes. With a very prominent on-screen arrow trail to guide us, we proceeded to get schooled by A.I. opponents which, according to a rep, were far from tuned.
The races were ... mediocre, for two reasons. One, the vehicles lacked any sense of weight, tended to slide far too much and -- despite what the rep said -- didn't seem to control any differently whether on grass, dirt, pavement or any number of surfaces. It just didn't feel right. The other downer was the lack of any real design to the courses. Well, of course there are no "courses" in a traditional sense (remember: giant, post-apocalyptic open world!), but the areas "sectioned off" for the races we took part in were purely mundane, devoid of any real personality. Perhaps the promised point-to-point races -- with a "blaze your own path" play style -- will be more engaging, but as it stands, the likes of MotorStorm gets what FUEL obviously doesn't.
Codemasters made a point to state FUEL has been in development for at least four years. From what we played, we'd wager that most of this time has been spent developing the technology, not the gameplay. Given that the game is due to roll onto shelves in May, Asobo will have to cram another four years of polish into three months in order to save FUEL from mediocrity.
