Asphalt 9: Legends 12+

Asphalt 9 is the latest installment in the asphalt racing series and it is Gameloft’s most ambitious one yet. In terms of visuals, there is nothing in the App Store currently that can even come close to it—this truly is console quality gaming in the palm of your hands. Asphalt 9 also screams style with smooth and stylist menu transitions along with an equally smooth gameplay experience on recent hardware.

The pay-wall does not feel too obtrusive that you need to buy card packs to unlock new cars. But, Playing the game without using real-world money will require some investment—if you intend to unlock the higher-end cars. Also, watching two or three 30 second ads to refill your energy bar instead of waiting 20 or so minutes is also a much, unexpected, welcome if you want to by-pass the time restraint and get back to racing again.

We should also mention that asphalt 9’s energy bar system is a little different from other games in a way that each car you unlock is allocated 5 energy bars or “Fuels” as the game puts it. If you have more than one preferred car, you can switch between them as one’s “Fuel” replenishes.

All-in-all asphalt 9 is a great addition to the App Store and it truly showcases what today’s portable hardware is capable of; don’t trust us? Download the game and see it for yourself.

As someone who had never played Asphalt before, I initially found this game to be great. Apart from the great tracks, what I like is the variety of options available to players in terms of the races they can participate in or the cars they can own. However, as I started playing more, I started feeling that the multiplayer races are definitely rigged.
You are always up against much superior cars no matter how much you upgrade. Also, in the case of races where all the players are racing identical cars with almost similar setups, you find yourself inexplicably slow and in the path of every other player who most certainly crashes into you. And in timed races, you race on the same track where you previously recorded decent practice timings but find yourself slow in the actual race afterwards (even after upgrading the car before the race). The developers seem to have set this arrangement up obviously in the hope that the players would invest in upgrading their cars further only to find themselves losing all over again!
The developers need to stop playing god and leave the game to the players’ abilities and their cars.

Asphalt 9: Legends is an undoubtedly lavish affair, one that is rightly used as a benchmark for the latest mobile devices. It’s a genuine stunner, boasting next-level particle effects, lighting, and realistic weather. But what lies beneath that polished exterior is something I’ve always struggled to get on board with: an arcade racer that strips the genre to the bone, offering up a theme-park experience more akin to a tech demo than a fully-realised game.

In its best moments, you can expect the same gleeful sense of speed and violent carnage as the earlier Burnouts, albeit with a much-reduced sense of danger. Crashing headfirst into an oncoming bus isn’t the recipe for disaster you might expect; instead registering only as the slightest inconvenience. Part of this is down to non-racer vehicles functioning like props on a set as opposed to genuine hazards.