Review by Mr Pinkerton - The one thing about racing games is that they are usually insulated from the passing fads that manage to shoehorn themselves into other games with such rashness.

Although Burnout Paradise was careful in limiting the size of its open world - and ensuring that a race was literally around every corner - Fuel is far less cautious in its approach.

Bigger is not always better.

A gigantic open world of over 5,560 square miles - the biggest ever in a video game - is certainly an impressive achievement, but we're not sure why anyone thought it would be a particularly useful asset in a racer.

Originally to be known as Grand Raid Offroad, this game is set after a global warming-initiated apocalypse.

It's a thin excuse to break out the Mad Max cars and start racing for fuel.

Rather than any of Codemasters' in-house racers (this was developed by French team Asobo Studio) the closest point of comparison here is MotorStorm.

Fuel features a similar range of motorbikes, ATVs, buggies and trucks to race in and gives you plenty of freedom to forge your own race course.

At this point, one of the game's more fundamental problems becomes apparent: the vehicle handling is horrible.

No matter what you're driving, the handling always seems far too loose and imprecise, with an awkward compromise between simulation and arcade styles.

The artificial intelligence is also remedial - and constantly gets confused about where to go.

Weirdly, although your opponents get impossible-to-beat speed boosts at the start of each race, they seem to purposefully slow down by the end.

That the core racing is so deeply flawed is bad enough, but the entire open world aspect is a wash too.

As you might imagine, the developer has found it very difficult to fill such a vast area with interesting sights and you spend much of the game driving through barren wastelands just to gain some minor upgrade to your car.

You can select races from the overhead map, but it's very confusing to use.

Not even the multiplayer options help the game, especially given how glitchy the online play is at the moment.

There are other bugbears, including getting absolutely no reward for coming anywhere but first place and the fact that, despite the premise, going off-road in a race is rarely helpful.

In short it's a bad idea, poorly realised and it's a mystery why Codemasters chose to champion it.

IN SHORT: Flawed racer which finds little of interest in its massive open world - least of all the race cars.

PROS: The huge game world is an impressive technical achievement and the graphics occasionally impress.

CONS: There's nothing actually in the world except poorly designed races with cheating AI and awkward handling.

SCORE: 4/10 Out: Now (UK)