Currently Playing: FUEL

There's no First Look for this because I hated it when I first played it. It seems that the teams ambition has out stripped either their talent or the amount of time/funds they had to make the game.

There's precious little in the way of tutorial and the career mode is badly laid out. Each area of the world has it's own camp where races can be chosen. Win enough races and you can unlock new areas. However when you get to the second and third camps you haven't got enough FUEL (the games in game currency) to unlock the vehicles needed to complete the new events..

The loading times are incredibly long. Sometimes longer than it can take to complete the event. The AI is terrible as well. It sometimes has problems path finding and the elastic banding is terrible. It's an out an out arcade racer really so you start every race at the back and the pack zoom off and you've got to catch them. Mostly they stretch out enough that you'll pass the last car just before the chequered flag but miss a gate or have a crash and you'll find that you're in last place. Conversley race a good clean section and you can suddenly find they've all bunched together and you can pass all of them in a couple of corners.

However I do like a driving game and so I stuck at it. Eventually in one of the long loading screens a tip was displayed about not ignoring the challenges, several of which are available per camp but have to be 'spotted' first. It turns out not only are these a lot of fun providing plenty of variety from the racing but also a great way to earn FUEL. Soon I'd unlocked plenty of vehicles and some of the games potential has been unlocked.

When it's good it's a lot of fun. The handling is very arcadey with huge power slides being the norm and brakes are almost always for wimps. Some of the events have very few check points and allow you to ignore the GPS and pretty much set your own course. The trick here is to balance the risk/reward of a more direct off road route with the tracks and roads where the vehicles travel faster. Is it worth cutting across the forest and saving a huge portion of driving? It's decisions like this on the fly that make it fun. Dodging between burnout cars and trucks and finding the jumps gives an impression of being Mad Max too.

There's a lot here. There's also a lot to like. It's a pity then that it feels, at the moment at least, that a bit more polish and play testing could of made all the difference.