Games Review: Asphalt 3 Street Rules
Asphalt 3 is a third party title from Gameloft, who specialise in phone games and have supported N-Gage since its first generation. This game is the follow-up to the Asphalt series of games from the first generation N-Gage and the Nintendo DS.
The gameplay ambience is arcade racer. The gameplay revolves around illegal street racing, and the emphasis is firmly on doing stuff you shouldn’t do: knocking other cars off the road, driving too fast, smashing into crates etc. The score you get for a race is far more influenced by what you do during the race than where you finish in the race, so if you come first but do very little else then you’ll get a very low score.
To get by in Asphalt 3 you have to master two things: nitro boosts and “drifting”. In general you should drift on every corner and use nitro boosts on every straight, which if done carefully should get you to the head of the pack fairly quickly. Nitrous can be picked up from certain points on the track, and they can also be earned by drifting and other activities. And of course illegal activity means the police will be after you, and if you do too many bad things you’ll see a police badge on the screen to indicate that a police car or bikes are on your tail
There are a total of nine cars and three bikes (in order of unlocking): Mini Cooper S, Ford Mustang GT, Kawasaki Z 1000, Nissan GTR R34, Aston Martin V8 Vantage, Chevrolet Corvette Z06, Kawasaki ZX 10R, Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, Ruf RT 12, Pagani Zonda F, Lamborghini LP 640, Ducati Desmosedici RR.
Over all, if you’re looking for a realistic racing simulator, Asphalt 3 is not for you. If you’re looking for a fun, easy-to-get-started arcade racer then this may well be your cup of tea. Despite its attempts at realistic graphics Asphalt 3 is actually a very cartoony title, like a sort of Mario Kart designed for petrolheads, which is a good thing.
A big shock for some people may be how little Asphalt 3 values winning a race or scoring a low lap time. If you get to the front of a race, stay there and finish first, your score will be very low. If you stay in the middle of the pack, cause as much mayhem as possible and then finish third, your score will be very high.
Seven tracks may seem like a small number, but the five distinct game modes make you approach the tracks in totally different ways. Catching a criminal in “Cop Chase” is a completely different game to smashing the city up in “Cash Attack”, and this kind of contrast adds greatly to the game’s replay value.
Perhaps Asphalt’s biggest drawback is the lack of clarity over what actually gets you credit in the end-of-race score. The score rundown after a race has a mysterious “others” section which frequently contains more money than any of the other bonus categories, and even the listed bonuses aren’t explained properly anywhere (what’s the difference between “Takedown” and “Road Rage” for example?). In one “Beat ‘Em All” race this reviewer managed to take down four cars at once at the start of the game, then another, then two at once at the end so that the total score was a bizarre 7 takedowns out of 6, all in the first lap. This would seem to be an amazing fluke, but the end-of-race score was very low because it all happened so quickly. Ironically for an arcade racer, Asphalt 3 seems to punish people for speed.
However, in general Asphalt 3 is a fun and playable game with accessible gameplay, a good selection of game modes, nice sound and nice (though sometimes a bit too jerky) graphics. The lack of online gameplay is a big disappointment though, even shadowracing would have been fun.
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