FUEL takes place in a Mad Max-inspired vision of America after extreme solar and environmental damage has transformed the landscape into a wasteland. Players traverse the game world in various off-road and motorsport vehicles while contending with dynamic weather events including tornadoes and sandstorms. An accelerated day-night cycle adds to the atmospheric tension. The post-apocalyptic setting provided narrative framing for the game's vast, lawless terrain and the loose competitive structure that runs through it.
The game's world is divided into distinct biomes and regions that reflect different environmental catastrophes, and players can drive continuously across the entire map without encountering loading screens. Crashing a vehicle or using the manual reset function to return to the road does trigger a brief loading sequence, but ordinary open-world travel is uninterrupted.
FUEL evolved from an earlier project that Asobo Studio had announced in 2005 under the title Grand Raid Offroad. The studio transformed that concept into the large-scale open-world racing experience that became FUEL, with Codemasters publishing the final product.
To generate a playable map of over 14,400 square kilometres, Asobo used procedural generation with a fixed seed. Storing a map of that scale as traditional data would have been impractical given the storage constraints of the era's game media. The procedural approach allowed the team to fill the world with plausible terrain detail across regions the player would rarely visit, while keeping the core game manageable in terms of disc size.
Guinness World Records recognized Asobo Studio with a certificate for the largest playable area in a console game, a distinction that gave FUEL unusual notoriety in the gaming press at the time of its release.
FUEL received average reviews across all platforms according to Metacritic. Critics responded positively to the game's graphics and the ambition of its world design. However, the gameplay systems drew more criticism: the rewards available through play were widely described as not worth the effort required to unlock them, and the racing mechanics were noted as imprecise. AI opponent behavior in particular was criticized for a pattern in which computer-controlled racers would lead most of a race and then slow down artificially near the finish to allow the player to win. In Japan, the game was published on 17 September 2009; Famitsu scored the PlayStation 3 version 28 out of 40 and the Xbox 360 version 29 out of 40.
Despite its mixed reception, FUEL remains notable for its technical achievement and for the atmospheric breadth of its open world, an experiment in scale that few other racing games had attempted at the time of its release.