After playing some other vaguely similar games, I felt compelled to try FUEL again. I'd forgotten why I abandoned it the first time, but it didn't take long to remember. Here is a short list of pros and cons to remind me if this situation ever happens again. Lists make for very lazy reviews, I know, but this game doesn't deserve more effort.
Pros
Trainer saved in patch folder. But why are you installing FUEL again anyway?
A note I left myself about the game after the last play attempt
- The map is very big, with very few unreachable areas, and often very vertical as well
- The view distance is very big, though detail doesn't extend nearly as far
- There is a decent number of cars and collectibles
- Driving is repetitive but can be mindlessly entertaining, particularly when jumping or at high speed
- Cars can get dirty with mud and clean again with water, and the mud effect looks okay
- Drivers on bikes and quad bikes will gesture to one another and look around, which is a nice but ultimately irrelevant feature
- Cars have multiple areas which can show different levels of damage, although it doesn't have much relation to the damage meter
- AI trucks drive around the map in free-roam, preventing it from being an entirely static experience in singleplayer
- Cars have a generous amount of air control
Cons
- The map is bland, save a few unmissable points of interest, and there is little reason to explore it
- The AI is seemingly unable to find paths freely across the map, and is given other advantages to compensate, including...
Rubberbanding is pervasive and often blatant, but only to help the AIOn reflection, this is less due to rubberbanding and mostly because it's more obvious how broken the physics can be when it's happening to other cars - though there is definitely rubberbanding- "Physics" apparently does not apply equally to AI cars and the player (particularly when it comes to movement across different terrain types)
- Collisions with AI cars are not just unsatisfying, but outright aggravating, and difficult to avoid unless you can reach first place
- Collisions with inanimate objects (e.g. trees) also somehow feel unnecessarily annoying
- Because of the above points, if a race with AI vehicles isn't trivial by taking shortcuts the AI ignores, winning feels more due to chance than player skill
- Many of the races use checkpoints, physical obstacles or other restrictions to counteract the free-roam element entirely, removing possible shortcuts
- Resetting a car takes time and ends with the car standing still, making it mostly useless during an actual race
- Driving is unrealistic, which isn't a con by itself, but the style and consistency of the un-realism is often unenjoyable to me
- (As a specific example, if you're stationary and apply a very small amount of throttle, your tires will spin forward but the car will move backwards, in what I assume is a mistake from simulating wheel spin.)
- Many sounds apparently have only one variation, including squealing tyres when drifting and over-revving, meaning the player will hear them constantly, and the music is uninteresting
- Road textures are highly repetitive, the most obvious being about a dozen metres of asphalt repeated infinitely without variation
- There is rarely a reason to drive over the various ramps and jumps, since there's no 'boost' or score bonus and it's usually slower than staying on the ground
- The day/night transitions are sometimes pretty but driving at night is fairly boring, and the 'bloom' brightness effect in daytime is too aggressive
- Car damage is linked to a single meter, with no effect except resetting the car once it passes 100%, but it still manages to be somewhat unpredictable as to what will trigger a reset, and once again AI cars can apparently bounce off collisions that would reset the player
- The different weather effects mostly only reduce the draw distance or deliberately screw the player, instead of having interesting effects on driving
- It uses the now-defunct Games for Windows Live
Conclusion
Play this game if you want to, you'll be sick of it two or three zones in. Also, assuming you can still find a copy.