FUEL

Aside from the real-time terrain deformation in Motorstorm (and a spattering of racers that simulate the effect) and Baja: Edge of Control’s sprawling 10-square-mile patches of race-track-covered open earth, there hasn’t been a whole lot of innovation in the off-road racing category. Open worlds with vast real-time components have given street racing a shot in the arm, but off-road racing has been pretty much more of the same with a new coat of paint.


The next big technological leap will come when THQ’s MX vs ATV Reflex hits later this year, boasting dual analog control with one stick for the bike and one for the rider, and the next step in deformation where your tires are immersed in actual soft terrain into which you can dig a groove a foot deep and then roll over it an hour later. In the open-world category, however FUEL pretty much resets the standard right here, right now. Asobo has delivered, as promised, the world’s largest racing environment created from actual satellite data. One-hundred-thousand miles worth of tracks, paths, and trails packed into 9,000 square miles of seamlessly streaming game world—truly a marvel to behold. But what good is size without content? Baja: EoC was huge by scale but outside of the racing (and often within) it was just so much...dirt. What makes FUEL such a breakthrough racing experience is what Asobo does both with the world and in it. Unlike any other off-road game in existence, “open-world” doesn’t begin to describe it; you can’t simply take off in any direction in FUEL. The world is REAL and thusly the laws of nature apply. It’s exactly like hopping on a bike or into an off-road beast and heading into the nearest wilderness (if it were legal). There’s no other way to describe it. Asobo spent four years on FUEL’s proprietary engine and it is truly a beast; draw distance, 24 miles. Two generations ago Daytona still had pop-up.



If you want to see all 9,000 miles of it however, you’re going to need a lot of stars to unlock new zones and a lot of fuel to buy the vehicles to win them. You need to win races to get stars—second place won’t do—and to win races, especially as the game progresses, you need consistently more and better vehicles. The racing in FUEL is as varied as the terrain, ranging from traditional lap-based circuit races to sprawling checkpoint scrambles, and the grand daddy of them all—Raids: up to half hour long no-holds-barred-first-man-to-cross-the-finish-wins-all-out mayhem. This is where Asobo’s amazing GPS really pays off, by computing the optimal path for your vehicle…not that you should follow it. Optimal doesn’t necessarily mean fastest, but when you’re all alone in the middle of a 30 mile race the GPS’s chevron can make all the difference. It’s not so great when you’re racing through a raging EF5 tornado that’s flipping cars like dominos, but what is? FUEL’s dynamic weather system and day/night cycle is the real thing. It’s not uncommon to begin a race in the sun and finish in the rain, and sand storms, snow, rain, and blizzards are all random occurrences relative to the region. The amazing thing about the racing is that for all the variation in length, weather, and vehicle type—and if you can ride it or drive it, it’s in here—they’re all equally well tuned and balanced.

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