Review by: Brian Rowe

Please tell me that tribal tattoos aren’t making a comeback. I’m pretty sure the style fell out of fashion with the likes of Limp Bizkit and JNCO jeans, and I would like to keep it that way. Someone obviously disagrees, because Fuel is visually laced with meaningless swirls and barbs of black. Fuel wants you to know that it’s a bad-boy, bursting with as much hardcore style and individualistic attitude as those other extreme off-roading games.

I apologize to any proud bearers of tribal tattoos that I may have offended. I’m sure that your tattoo is a unique expression of incomprehensibly deep significance.

The one feature that does make Fuel stand out from the pack is a sprawling landscape of 5,000-square miles, or approximately 71x71 miles. When was the last time you got excited about driving 71 miles along backwoods roads? I did it last week actually, and the only highlights of my trip were catching two minutes of a good song (forgot my iPod) and narrowly avoiding a speed trap. Fuel’s generic guitar riffs won’t even give you those two minutes of pleasure, and I reckon that a few police chases might threaten to make Fuel moderately interesting.

Free-riding is the earliest experience you will have in Fuel. It is liberating to drop into the first of 19 zones, created from satellite imagery, and start driving over hills and through forests on your way to a distant mountain. After 15 minutes of slaloming trees and grinding gears up steep hillsides, you reach the top only to realize that there’s nothing to do but look into the distance, appreciate the virtual vista, and roll down to find another mountain. As it turns out, aimlessly wandering across 5,000-square miles isn’t all that exciting with hardly a jump or a single opponent to contend with. It’s the equivalent of dropping a paycheck on a mountain bike only to ride solo on gravel roads.

Free-riding isn’t an absolute necessity to unlock new zones, but it is the best way to collect hidden barrels of fuel (the in-game currency) and discover lucrative challenges so that you can purchase more vehicles. You begin with a basic dune buggy and a motocross bike, but after a few races, you can start slinging mud with Mad Max-like cars, trucks, and contraptions that can only be described as metal monstrosities with wheels - and I say that out of love for all things post-apocalyptic. They all drive with responsive precision, but figuring out which one to buy can be trickier than dealing with a mustachioed car salesman.