Yeah, I abandoned it pretty quickly. The final straw for me was driving from one base to another. There’s absolutely nothing interesting about their road layout or their scenery. Heck, I came to a scenic viewpoint, and unlike every scenic viewpoint I’ve ever stopped at in real life on the side of a highway, this one was completely pointless. It was just a lake, with the view of a few trees one one side. It was a horrible scenic viewpoint!
Plus their roads don’t really make any sense to me. There’s major roads and minor roads, and dirt roads, but they all seem to randomly go off in different directions. The major roads don’t carve through the landscape like they do in real life highways. They don’t go through tunnels and over bridges in an effort to go in a particular direction. Instead, they meander all over the place just like the smaller roads and dirt roads. It’s all a complete mess, and none of it feels interesting or real. This is by far the least interesting landscape I’ve ever explored in a game.
Well, finally won every career race in this game… all 72 of them. 1200 miles traveled, 22 hours and forty minutes played. Playing over nine months. That’s like two and half hours a month… certainly the sort of game that you don’t mind taking a break from now and then. Sadly, this is the type of racing I enjoy - the not very realistic kind that doesn’t end up being an arcade racer and where for the most part you don’t need to memorize the track. It’s a shame about the non-friendly career progression and that they put a number of interesting races aside as challenges with virtually no reason to do. I absolutely loathed the circuit races. I would be surprised if there was a sequel but if they learned something from this they could probably make a pretty good game out of this concept.
I remember Fuel vividly, despite it not being in any way particularly “good”. It’s a great game for when you want to play something completely mindless and disengaging. The soundtrack helps. I think i’m going to play it when i get home today ^^.
