Asphalt 3D

Asphalt 3D is an arcade racer which features an impressive amount of cars and even throws in some motorcycles for good measure. The main Career mode sees you progress through 14 leagues that contain four events plus an optional unlockable race. There are standard races, as well as drift, cash attack, vigilante and police events.

As you race in the tracks you can pick up extra boost or extra cash by driving through the icons. Boost can also be acquired by power-sliding or taking out opponent vehicles, and extra cash can be accumulated by many means such as drifting, near misses, jumps or finding the many short-cuts. Drifting is fairly easy to do but the animation is a bit wooden. Maxing out your boost triggers hyper-speed which has a cool visual effect as well as the obvious extra speed.

Due to the fact it is arcade focussed, the course design is fairly straightforward rather than having harsh turns and hair-pins found in more realistic racers. Also, the penalty isn't harsh enough for grinding along the sides of the road, but you will be penalised from destroying your car which will set you back many seconds and incur a cash penalty.

Although the graphics and presentation are decent enough, the game feels like it is constantly struggling to keep the pace. When the game sticks to the races, the game is fun to play, but the police chases are slightly annoying, and the cash attack and drift races don't quite work. The problem with the cash attack is that the goal is set so high, you have no choice but to constantly drift to make up the extra cash. Then in the drift races, the goals are also too high, even if you drift around every corner, on some races you will still have a large amount of points to make up before you cross the finish line. So then you drive backwards for a bit, turn round and start drifting again. This really strips away the fun from these events and it just becomes tedious and frustrating.

As you progress through the career, you will unlock new cars to purchase, and can also buy the extra upgrades to add a bit more power to your vehicle. There is no skill in tuning, so it becomes a tedious task of going though each upgrade and choosing to buy them all one by one, which has to be done per car you add to your garage.
Overall, Asphalt 3D is a decent enough attempt at an arcade racing game, but the non-race events need some tweaking to make them fun rather than a tedious experience.