Review Detail

I'm not sure Fuel is a game. It looks like a game, it's ostensibly about "racing", and it has gaming trappings like achievements and bad rock music.... but it's cleverer than that. It never explains the point. Why am I entering these races? Why do none of the roads actually go anywhere? What is the purpose of my existence in this game? I think Fuel might be the first ever game of existential nihilistic racing.

Go here! Go there! Enter a race and beat some similarly purposeless people! Or don't! it makes no difference to Fuel. There are no prizes other than a slightly greater variety of more purposeless races and cars. And the genius to this game is that the racing is actually a chore. It's so slow and ponderous and all the vehicles behave like toy cars on ice, whether you are in a bike or a monster truck, and regardless of whether you are off road or on tarmac. When you're not racing, you can also just drive around. This is clearly meant to be a big part of the game, but it doesn't look like the developers were able to think of a reason why this is.

And the things that do work are so incidental and irrelevant... Fuel has the best skies ever seen in a videogame. There has clearly been a whole team dedicated to sky. Why couldn't that team have worked on the in-game GPS, which looks like it was constructed from Powerpoint clipart?

But there will be a time when you'll boot up Fuel. It'll be late in the evening, and you'll be all alone. High strength alcohol will have been consumed - my guess... cheap bourbon. The digital game world will roll by and as you drive from point to point to no clearly defined end you'll have plenty of time to question exactly why you're gaming alone in this utterly pointless world. Rarely has a game so accurately represented the ennui of the gamer. I personally have spent several hours with this game and am no closer to achieving anything whatsoever.