Asphalt 8: Airborne review

I've been playing asphalt 8 for some time now and feel it needs a review. The game is free to play and supported by micro-transactions.It involves racing a car and buying new cars with race winnings. Nice and simple, nothing to go wrong. There has been a recent major update so I'll review the game before and after this.

So to start off there is an excellent selection of cars, they are not ranked in any true-to-life game, nor do they sound at all realistic with even a mini cooper letting out a raspy kind of roar. But who cares, it's free and makes it more fun (this phrase herein referred to as 'bwcifamimf').

Also good for a free game are the graphics, there are lots of lighting effects and while the sun gets in your eyes on some maps which is really annoying when traffic is coming the other way, it isn't a big problem. Something else that isn't a problem is that speed blur that is incredibly inconsistent as to when it does and doesn't stop blurring the rear diffuser of the cars, bwcifamimf because speed blurring is cool.
The set effects on each map are interesting for the first couple of times but then get tiresome and break any immersion you may have built up with their slightly dodgy particle effects.

This is the blur before the update

During the first 'level' play through I found myself constantly entertained by the new maps, but all in all it only feels like there are 4 different maps, with each one sharing scenery from another. the gamemodes are similar in the fact that there are not many and they all feel the same, but that said you can't get very imaginative with car games as the whole aim of the game is to race (apart from in Flat Out 2 where they had the brilliant derby mode).

All of this together doesn't pose a major problem until you get near the end of the game. That is all 'levels' unlocked, all of the cars in the lover 3 grades bought and a good number of ones above that owned too. There is a shit-ton of grinding to do, with that average race winnings being about 4000-5000cr (it is almost double on your first run through for some reason but this only counts once) and all top-tier cars being 100k+cr. In the end I just stopped playing as it really wasn't worth the 100% completion. It also gets very mind numbing after a while with there being only 4 buttons to press (a,s,d and space) the car accelerates for you. HTe drifting is also naff and you can drift for whole laps at a time once you've got the knack for it (which takes 3 attempts to get entirely) bwcifamimf.

You need an insane amount of gameplay under your belt to own all of these.

The multiplayer mode before and after the update was hit-and-miss, with first time connection taking a minute tops, but all subsequent races (in that session) taking forever to the point where you just closed the thing and ran it again. There's no in-game chat so it's like playing against AI with different names and car that aren't necessarily from your car class. The balancing for cars needs work too, sometimes I'd be racing against stuff that destroyed my car, and others I'd be in a car that destroyed them. This isn't a skill thing either, the game pairs players really unfairly. I can only imagine that if the coding is sound that there just aren't many people online.

dem reflections

So all things considered (including the fact that this is a free game), before the update Asphalt 8: Airborne is worth 6/10, it's not bad, it's not amazing, it's just good, and that's nothing to be ashamed of.

So I stopped playing for a while before I noticed that the icon had changed, wondering what this was I clicked on it and found that the makers had released a major update. They've added more cars and a whole new map. Here are my thoughts on it bullet pointed. None of the previous problems have been solved, including multiplayer.

• Before, you were aware that it was supported by microtransactions. Now you are reminded about it every new menu you come to which is incredibly annoying.
• Only 1 new tracks (had advertised 'tracks')
• Graphics hurt my eyes now, the speed blur now blurs the scenery and not the car, and it blurs it to the point where you can't see where you're going and as mentioned above, it just hurts.
• More tablet optimised with a nitro thumb button, this isn't really bad as this is probably going to be installed mainly on tablets, but there's no option to turn the icon off.
• The graphics are worse but covered up with horrible neon blurriness. When the game isn't blurred everything is horribly aliased and grainy. They've managed to make graphics worse and at the same time made the game load my GPU more.
• Constant prompts to buy shit you don't want (again!!!).
• The camera angles messed about with so that it's either too close or too far away or it moves around too much, although this problem might just have been me being used to the old camera angles.
• Even more really expensive cars = even more grinding (if I had bothered). Every level had had an extra 3+ events and each car class now had an extra few cars that each cost another few tens of thousands at least. The race winnings hadn't gone up though.

This really isn't an exaduration of what you'll be playing through

So to conclude, the game is now a 2/10 and uninstalled, as this is the game you will be downloading you might as well forget about the 'before update' review and just not bother getting it, I only wrote that bit so people could see how good the game was compared to what it is now.