Fuel marks the re-invention of the level designer as a geographical mash-up artist. It’s 5000km² world is created using topographical data of the western United States, re-mixed and re-organised as a greatest hits compilation of it’s most famous and impressive vistas. America the Theme Park! A Main Street, USA for the natural environment. The boring between removed to create a Las Vegas casino’s version of the great American landscapes, a miniaturised Grand Canyon thrust up against snowy Mount Rainier sat flush against Crater Lake. It’s the America of the collective consciousness, of disaster movies, all scale and potential and awe.

These vast open spaces have been criticised for feeling empty, but there’s something terribly evocative about the stark, barren world. It’s epic, devoid of wildlife, inhabited only by aimlessly rumbling zombie trucks and a warped subspecies of humans unable to leave their go-fast machines. It’s a future so devastated by environmental collapse that there’s literally nothing left to do but move.

The main concern of Fuel’s populace doesn’t seem to be the basic necessities of survival or the re-construction of society, but entertainment. The world has been ruined by global warming, yet you toil in races to win fuel simply to buy new cars to race. The few concessions made to re-building the devastated world are turning the world’s roads into race tracks and its buildings into ramps, modifying the architecture of the past to combat the boredom of the present.

It’s got that gloriously single-minded Warhammer thing. IN THE FUTURE, THERE IS ONLY DRIVING.

I’m being knowingly forgiving. It’s unclear how many of Fuel’s limitations are the result of deliberate focus, and how many are caused by lack of time, resources, money. The driving model is unremarkable. The races are easy. It is buggy.

I don’t care. I’m not convinced a world of considered escarpment is inherently more empty than a world of man-made metropolitan streets. Fuel threads a needle through enough of my interests – architectural futures, solitude in games, exploration, level design – to make up for its shortcomings.

(The screen above is a press shot, because Fraps wasn’t working for most of my time playing the game. I’ve only eight lame screenshots of the starting area).