Fuel Overdose review for PSN, PC

I’ll be blunt: Fuel Overdose is bad.

Actually, that’s understating things. Fuel Overdose is terrible. Like, so terrible it might just be the worst game I’ve ever played. It’s certainly worse than any game I’ve played in recent memory — and in the last year I’ve played Page Chronica, Men in Black: Alien Crisis, and 007 Legends. In a nutshell, this is an ugly, glitchy, mind-numbingly boring, joyless slog of a game.

Honestly, there are so many things wrong with Fuel Overdose I don’t know where to begin. Bad graphics? Wonky controls? Random glitches? Any of the countless minor annoyances sprinkled throughout the game? There’s such a wealth of awful, awful options that it’s like drinking from a hose at full blast.

I’ll just pick one at random: say…the controls. At first I thought I was having trouble navigating my vehicle through the top-down course because I’ve always struggled a little with isometric racers. After playing through several (of the completely unengaging) storylines over many hours, and still finding it a battle to keep my vehicle going in anything resembling a straight line, I’m starting to think the problem is less with me, and more with Fuel Overdose and its habit of making your vehicle randomly flip over, or do 180 degree spins, or any of the many other things it does to make your car impossible to control.

Which reminds me: this game is, possibly, full of glitches. I say “possibly” because the random spins and flips might be intentionally built into the game. If that’s the case, it’s a forgivable — if annoying and a little bizarre — design choice. I’m a little less charitable in my reading of the times when my car suddenly started racing beneath the street, or when a random spin sent me flying off the road and the game kept resetting me on top of the same hole. I’m pretty sure that’s a case of the game just not working properly, and considering how long Fuel Overdose has been in development, there’s just no excuse for that.

Also inexcusable: the game’s graphics. First and foremost, the cars are all basically giant blocks. This, of course, explains some of those aforementioned seemingly random spin-outs; after all, when you can’t tell which direction your vehicle is facing because the front and the back look identical, it’s easy to get confused. The problem is less pronounced, of course, when you’re talking about some of the larger trucks, but those can take awhile to unlock — and considering the frustration that will surely come from anyone trying to navigate the indistinguishable little blobs during the game’s early stages, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to invest time and effort to make it to those larger vehicles.

Other graphical annoyances abound. When the cars crash into each other — a fairly common occurrence, seeing as Fuel Overdose is a vehicular combat game — they become difficult to make out. Couple this with the fact you can barely tell the fronts of the cars from their backs, and you have a recipe for…well, the kind of annoying controls I’ve already mentioned. And, on a completely separate graphical note, there’s one track in which a portion of the road is flooded. At this point, it should almost go without saying that the water doesn’t look anything like water. A more accurate description would be “shimmering nothingness”, which, while artsy-sounding, is presumably not what the game designers were going for.

I could probably go on for paragraphs more about why Fuel Overdose isn’t worth your time or money; Its sexist portrayal of female characters, most of whom look like 2D rejects from Dead or Alive (minus the jiggle physics)! Its poorly-designed tracks! Its obnoxiously repetitive soundtrack! — but at some point, it just starts to feel like piling on, and seeing as this is a PSN-only release we’re talking about here, it doesn’t seem worth it. Bottom line, this is just a bad, bad game, and there’s no reason whatsoever why you should even consider buying it.