A range of new Vista Points make the game even more picture-postcard pretty.

Some games never had a chance to achieve their full, immense potential, being rushed out or otherwise abandoned shortly after release. FUEL was one of them. A post-apocalyptic, freeform racing game set across an astoundingly huge game-world wracked by environmental catastrophe. It looked great, but the gameplay was unbalanced, the campaign awkwardly structured, the vehicle handling often strange and unsatisfying, and the AI wonky and prone to suicidal charges headlong into trees. It had a litany of issues, and while the game found a dedicated fanbase, reviews ranged from the cautiously positive to the outright scathing.

Enter dedicated modder Vetron, and FUEL: Refueled. This brave, lone soul has taken up the herculean task of making FUEL into the game it was meant to be from the start. While the project is still incomplete, the changes so far are impressive, and the next major release looks to be a massive overhaul of the underlying game structure. Even in its early stages, vehicle handling has been reworked, new PC-centric menu systems have been implemented, new races and features added, and even load-times have been vastly improved, bypassing the mandatory shader-crunching that happened on every startup before. And all of this currently weights in at just over 2MB of download. A tiny titan, if you will.

FUEL: REFUELED V15 Trailer video – Mod DB

Future plans are massively ambitious, too. The next major build looks to include a complete redesign of the campaign, with races made more freeform, the only barrier to entry being a vehicle of a high enough speed class, allowing for Motorstorm-esque Dirtbike Vs Monster Truck encounters. The weather system is going to get kicked into overdrive, too, allowing natural variance and shifting conditions over the course of a race, rather than everything being entirely predictable and pre-set. On top of all of this, Refueled plans to support the demo, too, allowing newcomers the chance of playing the game in its revised, refined form before putting down any money on the full version.

The new 'Free Roam Extreme' mode pits you against the very worst of the elements.

Beyond that, there’s plans for multi-language support in the works, a ‘compatibility mode’ to allow Refueled players to play online with regular FUEL users without breaking things, and even modular mod support allowing other community users to add their own gameplay elements, races and more to the mix. While the release of the milestone V15 seems to have been delayed somewhat, the project looks to be healthy and thoroughly impressive in ambition and scale. I really wish Vetron every bit of success – he, and the FUEL community, deserve it.

FUEL: REFUELED V15.4 [BETA5] – Gameplay Footage video – Mod DB

You can get the FUEL (currently only €9, as well as the demo) on Steam, and the Refueled mod over at ModDB. The community are largely clustered around the FUEL Race Organization Club group. With this mod on the scene, a potential gem might just become a shining diamond. Give it a look.