Asobo Studio is the developing company of this huge racing game, a game that has been already recognized by the Guinness World Records to have the largest playable area. I followed every detail about this game since GC 2008 because the game seemed to be so promising. It was like nothing would stand in its path to become a corner stone in the racing game genre. But everything collapsed without a reason, FUEL becoming just another open world racing game detached from the others only by its huge playable area. If I close my eyes, the only thing that comes in my mind is its hugeness and nothings else. It's like the developers wanted to show off how good they are in creating unlimited virtual environments without bothering to create a meaning for it. I could easily end this review right here, because this game is all about its dimension and nothing else.

In FUEL you have to race for fuel in order to acquire new vehicles that will help you complete new races and challenges. Although FUEL features an open world environment without loading times, every main race or challenge is accessible from the main menu. The whole area is divided into smaller regions, every region having a number of races and challenges that must completed in order to have access to a new one. Only in the end you will be able to explore the whole 5,000 sqm area. The question is, why did the developers bother to create such a huge environment if the players can access the major races and challenges from the menu? Because, every region has also secondary races and challenges. And these can only be accessed if there are discovered on the map. Besides secondary races and challenges, you can also find vista points and new liveries for your vehicles. I doubt that many of the gamers will explore such a vast territory only to look for a new livery. It's almost a sadistic goal when have to drive more than 30 miles for just a single livery. Not even the vista points, that might offer some nice views with impressive draw distances, can make you cross a region from one side to the other in order to discover it.

There are seventy vehicles to choose from across six different classes including motorcycles, quads, SUVs, muscle cars, buggies and trucks. Every vehicle has a different handling, based on the seven aspects of performance: speed, acceleration, grip, brake, reliability, asphalt, offroad. A vehicle with high offroad tolerance can achieve higher speeds on loose surfaces than a vehicle with high asphalt tolerance. The reliability aspect shows how much a car can resist until it becomes totaled. The game features no visual damage and any hit will have no influence in the vehicles' handling. The only thing that shows the state of the car is a damage indicator. Even if it's a 100% arcade game, these performance aspects can influence the success of a race. The only problem here is that the game is forcing you to choose only from a limited number of vehicles for each race or challenge, most of the time the collection available being unsuitable for the terrain in that specific race. Bike races will take place on endless wide areas, while the trucks races have a tendency to take place in narrow locations or on bumpy terrain. Also the handling of the vehicles tend to feel awkward in some categories: muscle cars tend to slide too much with an exaggerated over-steer effects, while the bikes feature no weight shifting and tend to be extremely rigid in some situations. In this way the difficulty is significantly increased. You also have to take in consideration that a race will be successful only when you will end it in first place. In addition, the A.I. is cheating on the highest difficulty by running faster using the same vehicle like the player and being "immune" to whatever obstacle it might encounter on its way.