In Dave Wallis's book “Young World” (another name is “only lovers survived”) there is a great scene. According to the plot, children rule the earth, and all adults committed suicide life. So, in one of the chapters, a certain guy makes a sortie into enemy territory. At night he finds himself in an abandoned building and sees a strange scene there. Children aged six to twelve are sitting around a broken TV and playing talk shows from their recent past.
This metaphor perfectly illustrates the tie Fuel -Games in which a bunch of large children (amateur carbiers) drives along deserted, empty California, fighting with each other over the last drops of precious fuel. On the roads now and then there are skeletons of cars thrown in a hurry former owners, and windmills on abandoned farms continue to spin as if nothing had happened.
This (not counting the helicopters that appear in the sky) – the latest signs of human presence. The greenhouse effect and a sharp change in the climate did not go in vain for people, and the entire population of America was forced to leave the continent. Only the most desperate lovers of extremely and adventures remained, daredevils, who do not feed bread, but just give the second gas pedal to the floor – who now needs these rules of the road? A great plot for playing in post -apocalyptic surgery would be a great.
Beyond the horizon
The problem is that Fuel does not seem to really want to be this game. Flying out with the theme of the post -apocalypse begin and end with the greeting of "Welcome to Wasteland!"(" Welcome to the desert!") Who meets us the game. The first location on which the races pass (pieces of maps open as a career passes), looks like I want to immediately rush to a picnic. The sun -flooded forest meadow (light effects in the game are simply amazing and create half the atmosphere), grass, shaking in the wind, and pure blue sky – the world of Fuel at first glance is more friendly than dangerous than dangerous.
In the future, we will also get access to other weather and climate zones, where there will certainly be deserts, scorched forests, salt lakes and even snow peaks, but the first impression is the most strong. But a large, dangerous, living in its own laws and a constantly changing world was to become the most important dignity of the game, the developers constantly pressed on this.
Now, after hundreds of Fuel-made kilometers in the world and many hours spent behind the steering wheel in the position “Gas to the floor, the steering wheel is straight”, it became clear that they tried, in general, in vain. To make a good car car, it is not necessary to fence thousands of square kilometers of the territory. Fuel’s open spaces are so extensive and empty that in an hour they cause a feeling of detachment, and after two – an acute desire to quickly teleport from here to hell.
In addition, Fuel has the most stupid navigation system in the world. The races important for the game are located very far from each other, so you have to wander between starts even more than fighting rivals. A couple of times the electronic navigator started me right into the sea, and how many hours was spent on the fight against a hysterical scheme of laying the optimal route (changing indications several times per minute) – do not count at all. And this despite the fact that the mini-card in the corner of the screen is uninformative and therefore absolutely useless, and it is not too convenient to check with its full-size version.
Feeling that the navigation system they invented, the developers added not only the avacuatere helicopters to the game, who instantly transfer you to the points marked on the map, but also the opportunity to choose racing stages (Challenges), bypassing long trips along the empty state. This was the last straw that broke the camel back. It is not necessary to travel to open new areas of maps, because the races are available right in the menu. And to wind hundreds of kilometers to find and open new coloring for machines or admire the sand -covered cities, forest fires and other depressing traces of human activity is simply boring. The Fuel world is not only empty, but absolutely statistical: at the foot of the volcano there is always snow, and a sandstorm is constantly raging on the plains.
Tractorists
“But how is the most important thing – races?" – you ask. No. In the same huge Test Drive Unlimited You could almost physically feel how the skin creaks in the cabin of your beloved Ferrari, and the local collective farm combines do not even cause such feelings. There are a lot of machines and motorcycles, among them there are really crazy specimens (bugges, airbags, three-wheeled motorcycles, bigfaths with huge wheels), but they are controlled and sounded the same dull. In addition, all of them is acutely lacking a sense of speed a la Burnout. In some places it comes to ridiculous – I want to get out of a pickup creeping on a flat surface and kicks to move faster. We will recall, it is not about the next simulator of SUVs from the series " UAZ 4×4 ", And about the arcade race.
In Fuel, even acceleration turns on automatically, when a certain speed is reached, so excitement and pleasure are not about this game. The main thing that gives an open world is the opportunity to move off the highway and lay the route yourself until the next checkpoint. Cut the road through the forest or ditches exciting, but this move again does not do it to constant loneliness. After all, electronic rivals, as it should be bots with a reduced level of intelligence, try to stay in groups and always choose the same road.
Another trouble is musical accompaniment, because nothing worse than slow, lulling guitar busts for such a game cannot be invented. Some of the dozen (and this is for many, many hours of the game) of the compositions, of course, is more vigorous, but lately we are all so accustomed to licensed music in racing games that it was a crime to abandon it. Do racers really have no their own radio wave, with which they could exchange information about future starts, transmit weather forecasts and order musical tracks? After all, if the developers guessed to do something like that, the world of the game would not have become so empty! There is, in the end, a positive example before my eyes Burnout Paradise.
The only thing that Fuel can https://sister-site.org/samiland/ somehow compare with the leader of the genre is graphics. Unlike completely unstressing predatory screenshots, the game itself turned out to be unexpectedly beautiful. Dirt and dust are realistically wound on wheels, and the cars, although they almost do not beat, but look quite modern. All this is not much left the level Colin Mcrae Dirt 2007, but with such sizes only respect is caused. And the most beautiful red-orange sunsets over the desert themselves stand all those kilometers of roads, forests and serpentines that are in the game.
* * *
Unfortunately, Fuel is not “Burnout by off -road” and even more so not “Motorstorm in the sandbox”. This is a game, almost entirely consisting of huge, boring spaces and monotonous, lulling music. From arcade races usually expect something else.
Reigracy – No
Cool plot – No
Originality – No
Easy to master – Yes
Evidence of expectations: 60%
Gameplay: 6
Graphics: 8
Sound and music: 5
Interface and management: 6
Waited? The failed arcade race in the open world, which may well fit young lovers of geography as an interactive manual on the relief and weather conditions of the state of California.
Mania rating: 6.5
"Above the average"