Posts tagged fuel

Had two half-hour sessions last night and an hour this morning.

The first session last night was simply free roaming around. Had a wonderful time finding my way up and around mountains to reach some liveries and vista spots. Great stuff, including a heart-in-mouth drive across a very narrow ridge.

The second session saw me find a challenge that I couldn’t do (of which more later). And then, for some reason I don’t understand, just before shutting down, I spent all my money. I went to the car list and chose random cars and bought them. I went down from over 100,000 Fuel to just over a thousand in seconds. Why did I do that? I’m not sure, honestly, but I think it was because I’ve been finding the currency a bit pointless, having so much stored up. I think I just wanted to get back to the beginning of the game, where every barrel found sitting in a forest or by a farm house was worth finding. I think I’m going to regret it, but we’ll see.

This morning I went to find the challenge I couldn’t do last night. It wasn’t the challenge marker I thought it was, so I went and did a nearby career race instead. I won on two-star difficulty on my first go without any problems. Then, though, the challenge was bothering me. Instead of driving to it, I just chose it from the menu. That’s the first time I’ve done that, but probably won’t be the last. You see, I have nothing against using the menus to go to races and challenges, it’s just not normally how I want to play, but this morning I just wanted to try the challenge again – so I did.

And what a challenge!

It’s a checkpoint race against nine other cars. You’re forced to use a particular car – one that goes incredibly fast in a straight line on asphalt, but which hates corners and which slows down to nothing the moment it hits dirt or grass. So, the tactics for the race are very simple – go fast on the straights and STAY ON THE ROAD. Yes, that deserves the capital letters. Coming off the road in this race is fatal. And it’s not easy to stay on the asphalt. You’ve got a car that doesn’t like corners. You’ve got nine other racers, all driving heavier cars that send you flying off the road the moment you touch them. Oh, and this all takes place in the middle of a huge storm, which reduces visibility quite significantly.

So, yeah, it’s hard. Luckily, the course you drive on, either by luck or genius design, is perfectly set up. It starts with two long straights, with a 90-degree corner in the middle. This does two things. It tells you as soon as you start the race for the first time everything you need to know – stay on the road, respect corners, go fast on straights. It also gives you, if you manage to stay on the road, a chance to get past most or all of the cars in your way. The next third of the race is the tricky part. If you’ve got out in front by the time you reach it – which you really need to do – it’s terrifying, full of sharp turns, climbs and drops. Taking it slow enough to stay on course, but not so slow that you fall behind, requires complete concentration. It’s very stressful, in the best way possible. Then comes the final third of the race, which is flatter, faster and actually quite easy. You can’t relax, as such, but it’s certainly less stressful.

It’s one of the best races I’ve ever done in a game. That track, combined with the opponents and the car you’re made to drive makes for a thrilling, difficult, rewarding race. When I finally won it – on my last try, no really, this one’s the last one before work – an Achievement popped up (for winning thirty challenges). I really felt like I’d earned it.

So there you are, one of the best races ever, either by luck or design. The interesting thing is, though, that if taken out of context – as a demo, say – the race would completely put people off the game. It works because you’re not always stuck using cars that can’t go off-road and refuse to go round corners, but because this is a special event. I’m never going to free roam in that car. For all I know, that’s the only challenge that will use it. But it’s brilliant.

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.