When you attend press events, people often try to use the length of the queues as sort of measure for the quality of the game that lies at the end of it. For example, at the recent 3DS event in Amsterdam, there was a large queue that led to the room that housed Zelda, Steel Diver, Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 3D, and Dead or Alive, that hardly went down all night. Asphalt 3D, on the other hand, was a little bit quieter. In fact, the Dutch hosts, with the 3DS strapped to their waists, almost seemed desperate to get you to play.
From their enthusiasm, and the lack of interest, you almost went into playing the game feeling sorry for it. This was the ugly duckling of the 3DS event - the little game no-one else loved. But actually, despite the lack of interest, Asphalt's not the broken game you'd imagine it might be.
To sum it up in a few words, Asphalt is an arcade racing game that focuses on spectacular racing rather than realistic braking. Having spent most of its life bouncing around the various downloadable game platforms, even making a stop on the N-Gage (anyone remember that?), before moving to the 3DS, Asphalt has certainly evolved since the last time we played it. With the same emphasis on racing fast cars around exotic environments, the game's drawn influence from games like Burnout, in making crashing half of the fun - as we quickly found out for ourselves.
Apparently, there are 42 real life licensed cars in the game - if you care for that sort of thing.
After picking our car from a variety of high powered, ridiculously expensive hunks of metal (being English, we went for the Aston Martin), and choosing from one of a number of courses based on real life locations (Paris did it for us, keeping the European theme going), we set off, barrelling around the narrow Parisian streets with our nitrous burning out the back of our car. Until we reached the first corner.
"Uh oh", we thought "we're never going to manage to take this". And, indeed, we didn't. Wincing as we approached a brick wall, we were suddenly saved by the AI, as a hapless computer controlled car decided to take the corner in front of us, meaning we went smashing into him instead. To our surprise, rather than just bouncing off him and us both carrying on, a bit slower, but no worse for wear, we crashed into the computer car with so much speed the game triggered a little cutscene showing us wrecking the other car, as it barrel rolled into the curb mournfully, a mangled mess of metal.
The crashes add a different sort of feel to Asphalt's races - and it's the sort of change we like. Now, if we can't beat 'em fair, we don't have to - we'll just take them down
Smash him, crash him, stop that yellow car now!
instead. It's not about racing seriously, it's about having fun - drifting, smashing into your opponents, and basically driving like a bit of a maniac. Equally surprising was that when we took the car down, a little icon popped up, telling us we'd unlocked an achievement, which always help keep us interested in games.
As a demo of the 3D, too, Asphalt had its moments. While racing around the streets didn't seem all that impressive, when we sped through a tunnel, the effect was surprising to say the least. It's hard to describe the effect, but with a wall, roof, or the floor on every side, it had a very real sense of depth - like going into hyperspace or something.
From the demo we played though, Asphalt isn't without its problems, and in particular, there's one glaring flaw they're going to have to fix before the release - the handling. At the moment, making your car steer is simply too hard - they don't handle like you'd imagine a dream car would, and instead insist on ploughing into walls, rather than taking a corner nicely. In a racing game, that's a pretty serious problem, but one we hope they'll fix before the launch. If they do, then despite the general lack of interest, Asphalt 3D could be a game that really deserves to do well.
