360

Got up an hour early this morning. Not specifically to play this – I was well awake and probably wouldn’t have slept – but the thought of being able to have a go did spur me out of bed. Did the last career race in The Big Cauldron’s Edge zone, then decided to drive over to the base camp in The Ashtray zone, where I’d never previously been. I underestimated how long it would take to get there by quite a bit, but just managed to reach it before it was time for work. For the first part of the journey I was using the Spider Wraith buggy, but kept hitting trees, to went back to the Shuriken bike, which is a lot narrower and, therefore, easier to take through forests.

Went into another new area, even though I hadn’t completely finished the last one. Yeah, I’m breaking that habit. I’m going to be doing races and anything else I come across along the way, because I want to see every zone before too long and if I try to do everything in a zone before moving on it’ll take forever. I’m a rebel… and I play by my own rules.

Anyway, this evening was grand. I did a couple of career races – an excellent bike race and a reasonable monster trucks race – and then did an Endurance challenge, a race of over twenty miles. The first time I tried I lost by about 150 yards. That was an… interesting feeling. But Fuel is one of those games where I never mind losing too much, because I don’t mind trying again. So, indeed, I tried again and won by about four miles.

And then I fell into a lake a lot.

Fourteen hours player. Seven hundred miles driven. Three zones explored, with a short detour into a locked zone to pick up a Vista Point I’d seen from the border.

I love it. Online’s a bit rubbish, I’ve heard, but I’ve not tried it myself. People are complaining about running out of Fuel to buy new cars, but I’ve got 80,000 in the bank right now. I’ve seen the odd disappearing truck, but haven’t encountered any real bugs at all. Even the Achievements seem to work properly so far.

It won’t be for everyone, I know, but it works for me. For a while now I’ve had an idea in my head. A huge expanse of hills and trees, having a target in the distance and finding my own way there, barreling down hills, splashing through streams, just driving. And it turns out that Fuel matches this ideal perfectly. It’s just exactly what I’ve been wanting.

(And I’m very pleased that the 360 supports streaming from iPods for custom soundtracks. Wouldn’t have been the same without my country songs playing as I drove.)

First impressions, based on a couple of hours of play. May well be long and rambling, will probably not make much sense, either. Apologies.

Fuel, from what I’ve seen, is, at its most basic, a game of resource management. You’ve got two resources to worry about, both represented my meters at the bottom right of the screen. These resources are SPEED and DAMAGE. The trick is to keep SPEED high, while keeping DAMAGE low. Pretty obvious, right? Well, yes, but I’ve not played an arcade racer – and Fuel is no danger of being mistaken for a simulation, three cheers for that – where conserving speed is so very, very important. There are an awful lot of points where gradients get steep and the terrain gets rough, making acceleration impossible and momentum very necessary. You can’t just mess up and then expect to be able to accelerate back up to full speed, or even any speed, in time to catch the pack or beat the timer.

As for damage, Fuel uses an odd system that, on paper, sounds awful. (And, it seems, is in practice for a lot of people.) It worried me greatly before I played. Your damage isn’t represented by anything more than a small needle moving around a dial. (And, sometimes, a bit of smoke. Ooh, posh.) If the dial moves over the top, a black screen with the Fuel logo appears and a couple of seconds later you appear back on the road, magically healed. You don’t see yourself crash. You see a tree, you see the tree get very, very close to your vehicle, then you see the Fuel logo. Sounds like pretty much the worst thing ever, right? It’s not. Somehow, it works. I’m trying to work out why. I think it might be because Fuel’s way of doing things keeps the focus on the driving. It’s a game about driving, not about crashing and burning. I understand that doesn’t sound convincing and I know people online hate the system, but I thought I’d hate it and I find it perfectly acceptable. Sometimes, though, I’d love to see my ride roll down a hillside and explode at the bottom. You know.

So you’ve got these two resources to manage. It’s different, it’s simple without being simplistic and it makes driving very, very interesting. For me. You may disagree. Plenty of people do and will.

And then, of course, you’ve got the world. It’s as big as you’ve heard. Graphically it’s very similar to Oblivion, in that it looks gorgeous up close, but awfully ropey the further away you look. Driving down a hillside towards open ground is the best way to make the game look bad. Speeding through a heavily-wooded area at sunrise the best way to make it look great. Speeding, though. Hmm. The sense of speed, at least in the early vehicles, isn’t there in either of the behind-vehicle views, but it’s pretty decent in the “in-car” (more accurately “no-car”) view. I normally use that view when I’m on a motorbike in the woods, for that 3D Deathchase/Return of the Jedi thing, but the further of the two behind-vehicle views the rest of the time. It’s not about the speed, it’s about driving through the world. Even the races and challenges are just things to do in the world.

If you were to simply go through the game via the menus then you’d be doing it wrong. Very, very wrong. Not only would you have to sit through a million loading screens in short succession, but you’d missing out on the all-important context. I’ve been driving from challenge to vista point to new livery, sometimes just picking a direction and driving randomly. Leaping over streams, screaming through the woods at night, watching the sun set over a lake, speeding through a still-burning forest fire… that’s what it’s about. Seeing a building off the distance, racing to it, then driving slowly around looking for any left-over fuel barrels.

It’s… I’m not sure. It’s not slow, but it’s relaxing. It’s not pointless, but there’s not pressure or hurry to get anywhere. It’s just what I wanted. I wanted just to be able to drive, bouncing my way through America. It’s what I got.

It’s the Assassin’s Creed of racing games. Some people saw the world of Assassin’s Creed, then looked for the point of it. Others saw the world and thought that it was the point, in and of itself. And some people saw Assassin’s Creed’s simple missions and simple rules and felt it didn’t fit a world that looked so realistic on the surface. There was a break there that some people couldn’t get past. And some people, like me, didn’t care. Some people were happy with a simple set of game rules, with a few clearly defined variables, in a gorgeous world. And that describes both Assassin’s Creed and Fuel.

For many people, Assassin’s Creed was a crushing disappointment, others loved it. Fuel will get the get the same reaction – is getting the same reaction. But I loved Assassin’s Creed and I think I might love Fuel, too.