There are two significant problems with Fuel, a presumably ambitious open-world racing game in which you bounce around vaguely post-apocalyptic territory in muscle cars, buggies, motorcycles, quad bikes, and even the occasional monster truck. And although this is exactly the kind of game I'd love to play, these two significant problems outright kill any interest I have in Fuel.

After the jump, I'll tell you the two things that kill Fuel.

It's not really the lack of polish. The uneven world-building is tolerable. Even the contrived progression that has me constantly buying new vehicles to win new races is passable. I don't mind the long driving distances, or even the fact that you don't have to drive long distances but can simply jump around and arrive at races via a loading screen. I don't mind the pointless collectibles for warp points or car liveries. The scripted tornado, sputtered out forest fire, and unreachable sunken city are teases I can live with. All of this wouldn't seriously affect my enjoyment of a game with good driving. But that's the problem. This is not a game with good driving. It's a game with terrible driving.

The vehicles bounce around without much consequence. They don't feel attached to the earth so much as sliding over it. I feel more like I'm slewing a camera than driving a vehicle. A muscle car on asphalt, a motorcycle on a mountainside switchback, and a quad on a grassy field all feel like minor variations on the same theme. Contrast this with Sony's MotorStorm series, which has excellent driving physics in which different vehicles behave very differently on different surfaces. What I wouldn't give if Fuel managed half the driving physics of MotorStorm! Or even the somewhat canned driving physics of Midnight Club Los Angeles, which fit neatly into the gameworld and provide thrilling races if not realism. In contrast, Fuel sputters along without personality and only minimal physics. Mash the accelerator, trundle along, try not to hit anything, and hope you win.

The poor driving model is no great surprise considering the game was made by a company with no experience with driving games (the publishers at Codemasters should have known better after publishing the excellent Dirt and especially excellent Grid). But even this mistake might be forgivable if Fuel didn't insist on slamming doors shut in my face and wasting my time by forcing me to play and replay missions with nothing to show for it until I win. This gets particularly tedious from the middle game on, when the races can easily last ten minutes. Come in second place, and those ten minutes are all for naught. In fact, when you fail a race (i.e. don't come in first place), you get the following message:

Try harder...or fail forever!!

Look, Fuel, the problem wasn't that I didn't try hard enough. The problem might have been that your driving model bounced me into a tree or maybe you randomly decided that one of these cars was going to pass me up. The problem might have been that I hadn't memorized the course. The problem might have been that I skidded out a few times. Furthermore, your game progression ensures that I'm not going to win until I buy the fastest car available for this race. Your AI cars are all but scripted to run on rails so that a single mistake can drop me so far behind that I'll never catch up. The problem isn't my lack of trying.

The problem is your lack of understanding what it takes to make a good racing game.

So after six hours of driving around this impressive swathe of terrain, I'm happy to put the disk away and fail forever at Fuel. Which just means I'll have more time to play games with excellent driving models like MotorStorm or games with excellent gameplay progression like Midnight Club: Los Angeles.