I have mixed feelings about the open-world approach a lot of games take these days, but one genre where I feel it almost always works well is the racing game.
When you have a game whose main purpose for existence is to allow you to take yourself on a thrill ride (or, in the case of more sedate simulators, a comfortable excursion) it makes perfect sense to provide the player with as much freedom as possible.
After all, what’s the point of giving you access to interesting, exotic and, more often than not, downright dangerous vehicles if you can’t really put them to the test?
Such, seemingly, is the thinking behind 2009’s Fuel from Codemasters and Asobo Studio (yes, them what done made Microsoft Flight Simulator more recently) — a PS3/360-era open world racer that, for quite some time, held a world record for the largest playable area in any video game thanks to its 5,560 square mile landscape. For context, that is supposedly a similar size to the real-life state of Connecticut in the States, if that means anything to anyone. (The UK, for context, is apparently about 94,058 square miles in total, meaning the world of Fuel could fit just shy of 17 times into it. Still pretty big.)
Anyway, yes. Fuel is a game in which the open world is the star. The narrative setup is supposedly that humanity, having fucked the planet beyond all recognition, has moved itself into idyllic little bubble cities in an attempt to forget all about the environmental devastation they have caused, but this caused there to be a large amount of leftover petrol and diesel to have been left just lying around for the taking. Rather than doing the responsible thing, it seems thrillseekers — including you, the player, you monster, you — have taken to making use of this fuel to drive a variety of vehicles around the landscape, presumably in an attempt to finish off the natural world once and for all.
All that doesn’t matter, of course; all it really means is that there’s not a lot of “civilian” traffic in the world of Fuel because supposedly no-one but the most extreme thrillseekers would bother setting foot in the wilderness these days. There are the odd vehicles you’ll find pootling around — and of course there are your opponents in the organised race events — but for the most part, driving around Fuel’s world is a fairly solitary experience. And it’s a rather pleasant, relaxing experience as a result.
Fuel’s complete world is split up into several distinct zones, each of which has a main campsite from which you can trigger various race events and get a rundown of what there is available to do in each region. There’s nothing stopping you driving across the entire map right from the beginning of the game if you so desire, but if you actually want to do anything in zones outside of the one you start in, you’ll need to earn some career stars by completing races.
Each race has three difficulty levels available and thus three stars available to acquire. As such, you can progress through the game by concentrating on clearing the easier races first in order to gradually unlock new areas and more variety, or you can more quickly power through the game by taking on tougher events. It’s generally advisable to have acquired some of the better vehicles in a particular class before taking on the harder levels, but not essential by any means.
Part of the beauty of the more structured side of Fuel is that there’s a wide variety of different event types. Sometimes you’ll be challenging lap-based races on a small circuit. Sometimes you’ll have checkpoint races where the checkpoints are a long distance apart, leaving you to determine the optimal route. Sometimes you’ll have race where you just have a finish line, leaving you to figure out the entire route to yourself. And then there are variations such as elimination races, where back-markers are disqualified at each checkpoint, and “tag” races, where all you have to do is catch up with and bump into a couple of other cars.
The more unusual types of race tend to take the form of “Challenges” rather than career races, which means you don’t earn stars for them; you do, however, earn a lot more of the titular Fuel from them, though, which in turn allows you to unlock more vehicles. And the more vehicles you have, the more choices you’ll have when attempting to pick something suitable for a specific event — it really pays to have a wide selection, even within a single class, as handling and suitability for various surface types can vary quite wildly.
Outside of races, you can just explore the open world as you see fit. A GPS system allows you to plot a route to anywhere on the map, complete with an optional floating 3D path of arrows to guide you, or you can just drive around freely, either on the roads or off them. You can switch vehicles at any time, too, so if you’ve been sticking to the roads but spot something interesting that requires a ride with better off-road handling, you can just whip it out whenever you need it. So to speak.
As you explore the open world, you will occasionally “spot” things such as vista points and liveries. These are collectibles present in each zone; the former simply challenge you to reach a particular location and touch a tower, while the latter provide alternative paint jobs for the various rides in the game. You can either attempt to track these down yourself, or hunt down the “Doppler Trucks” present in each zone, which reveal all the hidden collectibles in that zone after you give them a good crashing-into.
Your ultimate aim, presumably, is to unlock all the zones, collect all the collectibles, achieve all the career stars, complete all the challenges, bang into all the Doppler Trucks, retrieve all the secret vehicles and purchase all the non-secret vehicles. This will take a very long time indeed, and thus it’s best to approach Fuel as a more free-form sort of game that doesn’t really have an “end goal” as such; it’s just a game that is worth booting up when you feel like pootling around on a quadbike in the Great Outdoors would be something that appeals.
The game is starting to show its age a bit, with 720p visuals and sub-30fps frame rates on consoles, but that doesn’t stop it from still being very appealing to look at, particularly when you reach some of the more picturesque parts of the enormous map. The highlight here is the gameplay, though; this is exactly what an open-world driving game should be. It provides the freedom to explore and just enjoy driving various vehicles if that’s what you feel like, and the structure to challenge you with specific tasks if you want something a bit more focused to occupy your time.
At this point you may well ask why I’m not playing one of the more recent Forza Horizon games, which offer many of the same things that I’m describing above but with more up-to-date visuals. And the answer to that is that although I do enjoy what I’ve played of Forza Horizon 4 specifically, I found myself bouncing off a bit due the fact that none of the “structured” stuff in it seemed to matter.
For example, I could comfortably come last place in a complete tournament, wrecking my car with every event, and I’d still get a phone call from some Gen Z “influencer” type immediately afterwards telling me how “hype” they are about my “mad driving skills” and how they’ve managed to get me an exclusive seat in the most prestigious tournament in town, even though I clearly don’t deserve such a thing in the slightest.
In some respects, it’s nice that the game doesn’t roadblock your progress and lets you see everything it has to offer; in others, it just feels a bit patronising, like the video game equivalent of a Participation Trophy.
Fuel doesn’t do any of that. Your experience is up to you — and at certain points in that experience, you’ll need to prove your worth to a certain degree. I like that; it strikes a great balance between completely freeform simulation and structured game, and that, it seems, is something of a sweet spot for me in a game like this.
Fuel is a game that I enjoy just firing up and tuning out with for hours at a time. It has been ever since I picked it up for PS3 a few years back — and I suspect it will continue to be just that for years to come, also.
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