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Asphalt 4: Elite Racing
Posted in Racing on 29 Aug 2008
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Reviewed by
Steve Litchfield |
One of the very first decent 3D games on the iPhone, released a year ago, Asphalt 4: Elite Racing has now been given a new lease of life as a budget ($1) game. The aim is to attract pretty girls, race fast cars and err…. take out rival cars by knocking them off the road. The rewards? New cars, new girls, new street circuits. Asphalt 4 is unashamedly an arcade game rather than a simulation, so take it as such, enjoy it and revel in the fact that it’s nearly free.
First impressions are stunning, even after a year, with a rendered Quicktime movie that sets the scene nicely. You’re a street racer and you have to drive as fast as you can and ram as many other cars as you can. You’re driving against half a dozen opponents and you’ve got to finish 3rd or better in order to unlock the next circuit. Naturally, ramming cars will attract the attention of the police – when they turn up with flashing lights, guess what? You ram them and take them out too! Somewhat unrealistically, all this mayhem actually gets you benefits, including nitro boosts, essentially power-ups that you can apply at any point to boost your speed. And, in typical arcade style, there are extra dollar signs and nitro bottles to drive through, picking them up along the way. That’s Asphalt 4 in a nutshell, but there’s extra back story to add interest, with the possibility of using your acquired dollars to upgrade one of your cars.
Car control is via two touchscreen methods or, more intuitively, using the iPhone’s accelerometer. It’s true that the granularity of the steering is rather coarse and that you’ll find yourself veering across the road rather more often than you’d like, but – you know what? – it’s a lot of fun. There’s a pumping soundtrack, the courses are well rendered and still pretty sophisticated even by 2009 standards, and the gameplay learning curve as you conquer each circuit and unlock cars and new cities is pitched almost perfectly.
Extra eye candy sees you being able to look around your chosen car from all directions when setting it up and extra camera views (e.g. from a helicopter) that cut in when racing, especially after you’ve taken out a police car or competitor. Car enthusiasts will enjoy the accurate modelling (at least in terms of appearance) of some of the world’s best cars – even if you’d never dream of such outrageous driving in the real thing!
There’s a multi-player mode with which to challenge a friend over Wi-Fi, but it does require a bit of tech knowledge in order to open up the right ports on your router, which is a shame – setting up games should be easier than this. Incidentally, there’s also a mode in which you play the police car and have to catch the villains – but where’s the fun in that? At its original price, Asphalt 4: Elite Racing was a solid game purchase. At its new budget price, it’s an absolute steal.
(8 votes, average: 3.88 out of 5) 
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