All About N-Gage - Gsm Technic Service

Yes the thing that stands out about Brothers in Arms…

No it’s not - it’s stupid, it will drive…

Enough about the cack-handed…

What happens when you only uploade the first 20 seconds of a screenshot - would you buy this game?

Okay, I’ve paid my money now, can I see more than the first 20 seconds?

Yes, the thing that stands out about Brothers in Arms on the N-Gage isn’t the fact that we’ve got one of the brand names over from the console world, it isn’t that we’ve got a decent 3D shooter game, it isn’t that we’ve got a solid graphics work out for the N-Gage next gen platform. It’s the fact that Gameloft, in what can only be described as a visionary understanding of how human psychology works, think that a 20 second demo of a game is going to help sales.

No it’s not - it’s utterly, utterly stupid, it will drive people away, and quite frankly if I wasn’t reviewing this title I would have skipped over the game, no matter how good it is, because Gameloft doesn’t care about me and or trust me to judge the game on its own merits. Let me point out that the original Doom had 27 levels. The demo for Doom consisted of the first 9 levels, in full. No time limits; no limited replay counters; but it became one of the biggest games ever.

Enough about the cack-handed demo (but lets hope someone takes note) and have a look at Brothers in Arms in action. What we have here, as mentioned already, is a 3D shooter, with the camera sitting behind your soldier (who appears to be called Barney). You and your squad have landed on the shores of Normandy just after D-Day, and you’ll work through a number of missions, getting closer to Berlin as you progress through the game.

Those of you expecting the same innovations as you would find on Halo (on the XBox or PC) might be in for a disappointment. But that’s a good thing, because the N-Gage platform needs a simpler control system. There’s an argument that modern first person shooters on consoles can be insanely complex, with two analogue sticks needed just to move you around and look, then all the buttons hanging off and used in combinations that are more complicated than a shadow puppet of the Golden Gate Bridge.

What you have in Brothers in Arms is a simple control set. Left/Right/Forward/Backward on the cursor, sidestepping with a pair of number keys, and hitting ‘0′ to aim your rifle by peering down the barrel - being World War Two, there are no telescopic sights or laser guided bullets. You want a better view, you have to get closer.

And here’s where Brothers in Arms makes best use of the Nseries platform, because the graphics are about as good as you can make them on a QVGA screen, with the technology available. You have to remember that this is on a mobile phone, with limited power and processor cycles, so no putting it next to an HD game on your 42 inch plasma TV; take that into consideration and the graphics here are impressive. I’m not going to say they’re jaw dropping, amazing, or the best on a mobile platform, mainly because the look of the game seems very reminiscent of Ashen on the original N-Gage and N-Gage QD. What I will say is that everything is clear and understandable, you can tell buildings, tanks, terrains, friend or foe apart easily.

But here’s the thing about the graphics on a small screen, and here’s where putting a shooter on the N-Gage is a risky move. While there is an auto-aiming component when you run around the map, you can also stop and go for more precise aimed shots. Trying to do a decent head shot from more than about 10 meters (according to the in game rangefinder) in this way is a matter of pixel perfect precision. Tiny taps on the direction pad while in the aim mode are needed to get right onto the head, which may or may or may not be moving.

I’d also love to say that this slows the game down, but in all honesty it doesn’t. Like the heavily laden soldier that you are, Brothers in Arms feels sluggish. Now by that I don’t mean it has a poor frame rate or that the graphics and sound are a few moments behind any action you make. No what I mean is that the gameplay itself is slow.

This is meant to be combat, fast, furious, with strategic moving around terrain, taking cover as needed, circling around the enemy to shoot them in the back before they see you.

Brothers in Arms provides absolutely none of that. You run at one speed and there’s no sense of urgency. When you’re being shot at and running for cover, things happen at the same speed as when you’re ambling down a country lane at the end of a level. There’s no adrenaline rush as the bullets start flying overhead.

Oh, and forget about circling round the enemy. You map be in a mapped out area, but this is a linear route of gameplay. You’re travelling down a fixed corridor created by the programmers, with no significant branching away or choice of direction possible. Sure, you have blocks of trees and boulders for cover, but do you get a choice between a frontal assault, or edging along a river bank? Nope. Straight ahead and fight, soldier!

Also, for a mobile game, the save game mechanism seems inadequate. You can jump to any level you have passed, and to the subsequent unpassed level, or return to an intermediate checkpoint you pass in the current level. It would be nice to be able to save at any point. The whole point of a mobile game is that you are mobile - pausing and backgrounding the app isn’t enough in my book.

The online options is… a high score table. Which is… a nice idea. Next!

My one worry with Brothers in Arms is that it’s supremely easy for people to compare this to other console versions, such as that on Sony’s Playstation Portable. (fx: Ewan leans over to his shelf and picks up his PSP and Brothers in Arms). I’ve argued before that Nokia need to be very careful with any situation where they end up going head to head in comparison to other platforms. They need to maximize their own platform strengths, not be placed alongside the strengths of another platform.

But forget all that, because Brothers in Arms actually works well on a mobile. Sure it’s not a deep game, with tactics or thinking required. Neither is it a complex 3D shooter with sculpted landscapes, deformable terrain, and massive areas to explore. It’s effectively a shoot-em up. Dodge the occasional bullet, go where you need to, press fire and use up your infinite supply of ammo. It plays well, it looks good, and you do get a feeling of wanting to finish just one more level.

Joining the launch line-up of titles for the N-Gage Platform is Gameloft’s Brain Challenge. While there will be a handful of ‘big’ titles for the N-Gage, Brain Challenge is not one of them - but there’s nothing wrong with that. While the flash titles make up the column inches, it’s games like this that are going to be the bread and butter earners for Nokia and its partners.

It would be mighty interesting to see just how well Brain Challenge does in the ‘revenue earned’ column after three or four months. I would not be surprised to see this title become a solid and continuing revenue stream for the Finns. Nothing here is especially new, but it fits well into the genre of ‘play a little puzzle every day’ that was started by Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training on the Nintendo DS.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this, you play a series of mini-games each day, each lasting a few minutes at most. The scores for these games are combined to give you a ‘daily score’ and this is compared to previous scores. If the theory of exercising your mental ability holds true, you should see a steady improvement. Rather than progress through a games storyline, you progress in yourself, creating a much better and more rounded person in the process.

Or you could argue that developers have found a way to write really simple games and package them up for profit, but only a cynic would think that….

Gameloft should be congratulated for some good presentation here - the games (12 in total, I believe) are grouped into the four areas they are testing, namely Maths (annoyingly labelled Math in my version…), Memory, Visual and Logic. The games are all controlled with the d-pad (and the occasional button press), so there are very few issues with the controls. Which is good - the point of these games is for you not to be thinking about what key to press next, but simply to think.

Two examples of the mini-games should make my point clear. The first is Balance, coming under the Logic section. You’re presented with a set of scales and asked which item is heavier. Initially this is pretty easy - just go for the one which has dropped the scales. But as you progress through your 60 second game, and as you play it more and more often, you’ll come across more difficult challenges, with multiple items on each side of the scales, or even scales on top of scales. Yet you’re asked to work out which of two single items is heavier with a flick to left or right of the cursor. Fun indeed… well it is to me.

Trout, under the Maths section, is another example of something that looks simple, and is… if you ignored the timer. Given a grid of numbers, a start point, and then a mathematical operator (e.g. ‘+4′) you have to jump from your target square (say it has 17 in it) to the square that is next in order… i.e. 17+4=21. So jump left, right, up or down to the square with 21 in it; then 25; then 29… Make five jumps and you get a new grid and new modifier. Much like Balance, and many of the other games, it’s a basic task, but when put under pressure to do as many as you can against the clock, that’s when it gets interesting.

There’s nothing especially new in this mix, nor are the games amazingly ‘out there’ - we’re talking basic pattern recognition in many of the games, some quick mental mathematics and some cunning psychological tricks when you’re counting (such as four red number threes), but the games are clear, surprisingly fun, and, by limiting each game to a time limit of 60 seconds, stay fresh and challenging over the time you’ll be playing the game - and as you play, you’ll unlock more of the mini-games.
While the idea of a learning curve goes somewhat against the grain of the daily brain game genre, Gameloft’s unlocking strategy keeps the title from going stale. Coupled with the ten minutes a day nature of the game, I think Brain Challenge is going to do very well.

– Ewan Spence, April 2008

Gameplay

Bounce: Boing Voyage is a 3D sequel to the original Bounce games which many of you may remember from some of Nokia’s older phones. The original game involved guiding a red ball through various levels, and the new version follows the same basic idea.

Since Nokia first announced it was going to become involved in the gaming industry, many people asked what their mascot would be. Sega has Sonic, Nintendo has Mario, what is Nokia’s? Well, this is it, Bounce is as close as you’re ever going to get to an old-style mascot for Nokia. The character has more personality than the faceless Snake, and already has a lot of iconic value thanks to its earlier appearances in 2D on some very big-selling phone models.

You start the game as a red rubber ball in a cartoon forest, where an evil floating cube is hypnotising the creatures of the forest to cut down all the trees (this is rather a psychedelic game on many levels). As you pursue the cube you journey through three zones, each with four levels. The levels themselves are subdivided into linked sections which you progress through linearly, and each section contains some kind of puzzle or challenge which may require dexterity, clever thinking, or both. As you clear a level the next level is unlocked, and these are all accessible from the game world map so you can go back to them if you like. Levels take a while to load, perhaps 10 or 15 seconds on average, but once you’re in a level the different sections load instantly so the overall loading time is very low.

The easy way to complete a level is to just go through it ignoring all the bonuses, but if you want to score maximum points you have to collect all the glowing spheres, and this can be very tricky as some of them are hidden or in awkward-to-reach places.

As you progress through the game you will be able to turn into two other kinds of ball, and all three types have their own abilities. Many later puzzles require you to use all of these abilities, and it may become easier to collect spheres on earlier levels if you go back to them after gaining a new kind of ball. The pace of the game varies tremendously, with some sections moving at very high speeds while others force you to stop and think.

It’s very very easy to learn how to play Bounce as each gameplay element is introduced one at a time, with the first levels effectively acting as a tutorial.

There are also three separate Arena levels, but more about those in the Arena part of this review.

Bounce Boing Voyage feels like a combination of Mario 64, Sonic The Hedgehog and Super Monkey Ball, and is very console-like. This could easily be a Nintendo DS game for example.

Graphics & Sound

The game looks wonderful, it has nice bright colours and well-designed scenery, with a fast and smooth 3D engine that never slows down even when the ball is moving at high speed. There’s a good variety of scenery and objects, and even relatively small sections can seem large thanks to the careful level design.

There are numerous cut scenes, most which use the game’s own 3D graphic engine so they blend in with the gameplay perfectly. Many of the images the game uses are unusual and memorable, with a combination of cute animals and surreal psychedelia. There are also a few cut scenes which use 2D artwork that have an ink-heavy comic style.

The sound is great, there’s a lovely soundtrack that starts out jolly and gets darker towards the end of the game. The music complements the graphics wonderfully. The sound effects are good too, with a variety of noises for the different ball types and some amusing things thrown in here and there (such as the clucking that the giant cube birds make when you step on them).

Two of the three Arena-oriented levels, the left involves cannons while the right involves high speed

N-Gage Arena

There are three Arena-based levels which you can unlock by collecting enough spheres from the main levels. They appear in the centre of the game map so you can go to them at any time.

The Arena levels have no real end points and you can’t die, they’re simply contests to score as highly as possible within a time limit. You score automatically by just being in the level but to get a good score you should collect coins (which add points at a faster rate) and rings (which extend the time limit). Each level has a completely different design, requiring different kinds of skills to do well in it, and people who do well on one Arena level may not do so well on another.

Scores are uploaded to an online league table so people can compare their rankings.

TV & Keyboard Test

Some N-Gage-compatible phones (e.g. Nokia N82, N95, N95 8GB, N96) have a TV Out feature which lets you connect the phone to a television set. This can be used for playing N-Gage games, or for any other phone function.

All N-Gage phones are compatible with Bluetooth keyboards that use the HID Bluetooth standard, and such a keyboard can be used to control games or any other phone function.

Bounce is perfectly playable through TV Out, it’s very much like playing an old console game. The colours are lovely and bright though the 3D textures look pixelly. The music is nice to hear through the television’s speakers.

Our Bluetooth keyboard worked absolutely brilliantly with the game, showing an instant response to every key press. Note that you have to redefine the “jump” and “change shape” keys from the settings menu when in horizontal mode, because these functions are mapped to the phone’s gaming keys by default. Redefining them to 1 and 2 seemed to work well.

Overall

Bounce: Boing Voyage has lovely graphics, a gorgeous soundtrack, fun gameplay, a very welcoming learning curve, and above all bags and bags of charm. If you complete the game and pay close attention to the end credits, you’ll see an example of how the developers have gone beyond the call of duty with this project.

It’s a very “player-friendly” game, it never traps you in an unfair situation, and if you do die you always feel that you deserved it. If the worst happens, it puts you in the nearest safe place to where you died so you don’t have to repeat anything you’ve already done. Bounce maximises fun and minimises drudgery, which is ideal for a phone game.

Some hardcore gamers may say Bounce is too easy and too short, but they’re wrong. Firstly, simply going through the levels is much easier than completing them at 100%, and completing the game the easiest way only earns you about 200 pickup points out of 1000. Secondly, there are the Arena levels to keep the gameplay going even when you’ve fully completed the story mode at 100%. Thirdly… this game costs 7 euros. That’s about one sixth of the price of one Nintendo DS game. The amount of gameplay you’re getting for your money is huge, and it’s definitely the best 7 euros this reviewer has ever spent on a brand new game.

It’s not perfect: the gameplay isn’t as original as Reset Generation or Mile High Pinball, it might have been nice to have more hidden areas and different routes through levels (perhaps based on ball type) to increase replay value, more difficult puzzles in the later levels would have made them much more satisfying, and of course more levels in general would be very welcome. Some kind of multiplayer mode, either online or Bluetooth-based, would have been the icing on the cake.

However, for 7 euros Bounce is excellent value for money. It’s a carefully-crafted very playable 3D platformer which has managed to find its own style without being too derivative, and it successfully reinvents a forgotten game series. Hopefully we’ll see more Bounce games (and more games in general) from the developer Rovio as this is a brilliant debut for them on N-Gage. They clearly know what they’re doing.

Gameplay

Block Breaker Deluxe is a clone of the ancient-but-popular Breakout/Arkanoid genre, you move a bat at the bottom of the screen to bounce a ball into bricks at the top of the screen. The goal of each screen is to remove all the bricks by bouncing the ball into them, but some bricks may take more than one hit to remove. If the ball hits the bottom of the screen you lose a life.

As with most modern Breakout clones, many bonus items have been added to spice things up, including a magnetic bat, fireballs (which destroy blocks more quickly), shields at the bottom of the screen, multiple balls, laser cannons etc. Some bonus items aren’t beneficial, for example one shrinks the bat and another makes the bat invisible (which makes the game impossible to play).

Most of the items are recycled versions of bonuses in previous clones, although there is one bonus which is particularly interesting: the yo-yo, which lets you pull the ball straight back to your bat as if it had a piece of string attached to it. If any bricks are in the way of the ball when you pull it back, the ball tends to destroy them, even if they’re indestructible bricks such as those made of steel. Another innovation is that the items can be bought separately and upgraded in an in-game shop, so for example the magnet bonus just holds one ball on the bat, but if you buy the first level upgrade it will hold two, and further upgrades let it hold more.

Games are split into locations with many main levels each and a boss level, after you defeat the boss you will see a new location unlocked. If you lose against a boss, you’re given the option of continuing in exchange for a chunk of the cash you’ve earned so far. The boss levels play slightly differently to the normal levels, and involve doing things like hitting an ice cube, avoiding laser beams, or destroying an advancing wall.

As with all N-Gage games, you can always exit the game and come back where you left off, so you can play for very short bursts or long playing sessions.

On a very few occasions the ball would get stuck behind a particular group of bricks, but this was easily solved by exiting the game and re-entering.

Graphics & Sound

As you would expect from the genre, the graphics are mostly the kind of thing you’d have seen on a 16-bit system such as an Atari ST, Amiga, Mega Drive or SNES. The visuals are perfectly competent and pleasant, but there’s nothing spectacular. The whole game has been done with a 1970s/1980s glamour feel, featuring bright neon colours, luxury yachts and huge sunglasses. First gen N-Gage gamers may be slightly reminded of Glimmerati in terms of the setting.

Sound is also very similar to the 16-bit era, with multi-channel MIDI-style music. Again, the tracks are pleasant but there’s nothing here to amaze you. The music plays on menus and at the beginning of games, but fades out once the action begins, so it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

N-Gage Arena

There’s no online multiplayer, though you can play Bluetooth multiplayer. You can upload your score to an Arena scoreboard and there are also N-Gage achievements to unlock which earn you N-Gage Points. The achievements are rather dull and random though, and the game already has lots of very similar challenges and bonuses, so it sometimes feels like there’s too much to aim for.

Overall

Block Breaker Deluxe is one of the cheaper games available on N-Gage, and at 7 euros it’s not going to break anyone’s bank. If you enjoy Breakout/Arkanoid then you will definitely enjoy Block Breaker Deluxe. It’s also a very casual game, with a nice relaxing feel to it.

If you’re looking for something new though, this probably isn’t a good place to start your N-Gage experience. The bonuses, bonus upgrade system, unlockable locations and boss levels do greatly improve on the original concept, but most of the time it’s still the same gameplay that has been in Breakout since the 1970s.

Gameplay

Asphalt 3 is the follow-up to the Asphalt series of games from the first generation N-Gage and the Nintendo DS. This is a third party title from Gameloft, who specialise in phone games and have supported N-Gage since its first generation. (The Asphalt brand is also used on Java titles from Gameloft, but these aren’t really the same games, they just have similar names and themes.)

The Asphalt games are arcade racers, i.e. they’re not realistic in the slightest. Their purpose isn’t to simulate driving, but to let you pretend you’re in a car chase from films like “The Fast And The Furious”, doing ridiculously over-the-top driving that would never be possible in real life. 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. Nitros can be picked up from certain points on the track, and they can also be earned by drifting and other activities.

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 bike are on your tail. If they catch you there’s a hefty penalty to pay, so you can either try to outrun them or nudge them off the road, both of which earn you bonuses. Illegal activity also attracts the attention of news helicopters and you’ll sometimes find yourself looking through the camera of a news report, which means you briefly have to steer the car from above (rather like the original gen N-Gage game Glimmerati).

You start the game with just a couple of tracks unlocked, but as you earn money you can unlock the others, making a total of seven tracks (in order of unlocking): Honolulu, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Rome, St. Petersburg, Mumbai and Tokyo.

Earning money also unlocks new vehicles and new engine parts in the garage. You can choose any unlocked car or bike and any unlocked part before a race. The parts menu gets very complex as you unlock more and more, but the garage helps you by displaying the effect each part has on your vehicle’s abilities (for example a part might increase top speed but reduce acceleration).

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.

Whichever car or bike you choose, the other cars on the track will automatically be chosen to match it, and the “rubber band” gameplay means you never pull that far ahead of your rivals, but never fall that far behind either.

There are a total of five game modes which can be unlocked, covering a variety of contrasting gameplay styles:

- Race: A straightforward three lap contest to get to the finish line, you earn the most money from bonuses on the track but you have to finish in the top 3 to keep the money.

- Beat ‘Em All: The most aggressive mode, you have to push six other racers or police cars off the track before you’ve done three laps.

- Cop Chase: The roles are reversed, you control a police car and your task is to catch the leader of some street racers. Hitting innocent cars costs you points, but at least you don’t have to worry about police trying to catch you for speeding.

- Vs: You race against one other car to reach the finish line after two laps.

- Cash Attack: You have to earn over $20,000 from various bonuses by the end of three laps. If you earn less than this, you lose the race. One major snag in this mode is that if you lose it doesn’t tell you how much you did earn, so you’ve no idea how much you lost by, making it very difficult to chart your progress.

The strategy you need to win varies wildly from one mode to the other, for example “Beat ‘Em All” doesn’t require you to be anywhere near the front of the race while “Vs” requires you to come first.

The game can be played in both vertical/portrait and horizontal/landscape modes, and can also be flipped if you want to use the controls on the other side of the phone. Because it’s a racing game it felt slightly more comfortable to play in horizontal/landscape mode, but it was still perfectly okay in vertical/portrait mode, especially if you use the camera keys to zoom out a bit before the race begins.

The controls of the game are fairly similar in all modes, with the bulk of features being accessed through the d-pad (the button does nitro, down brakes, left and right steer). Drifts are a bit trickier, you have to press 8 during a turn, but if your phone has gaming keys you can drift with the lower gaming button. The keypad’s * and # buttons control the camera angle, which is most useful in vertical/portrait mode as it lets you see more of the road around you.

Three of the twelve vehicles in the game

Graphics & Sound

Before we discuss the graphics in Asphalt 3, it should be remembered that this isn’t a 50 euro console game, it’s a 10 euro phone game. As a phone game, the graphics are very very good. They’re not perfect, and they’d be better if they used the graphics accelerator chip on certain N-Gage models, but in general the game looks extremely pretty and detailed. As well as you and the other racers, the streets are populated with other traffic, police cars, trams and even press helicopters, which really adds to the atmosphere. Perhaps the biggest graphical glitch is the strangely wobbly camera at the beginning, but once the race begins the camera is fine.

The look of each tracks is very different thanks to the globe-trotting nature of the game. The 3D is a lot more detailed than on previous Asphalt games, and the game world on each track feels a lot more real. However, it would have been nice to see more variety on each track through the use of different times of day and different weather conditions (the snow on the St. Petersburg track is a tantalising glimpse of how much this could have added to the game).

The feeling of speed conveyed by the graphics varies from track to track and situation to situation. Sometimes, especially when you’re using the bikes, the game feels incredibly fast, but in other situations the game starts to slow down because there are too many objects near each other at once. In general though the game is playably smooth. A higher frame rate is always welcome of course, but the current frame rate is perfectly adequate.

Sound is pretty much what you’d expect from this kind of game, the music is straight out of a Hollywood film with a mixture of pop, rock and hip-hop. The title screen has a rather nice rendition of Misirilou in the style of Dick Dale. The soundtrack and sound effects are all recorded in high quality, and suit the game very well. Whether you like them depends on your taste, but if you enjoy arcade racers then you’ll probably enjoy Asphalt 3’s sound.

The one problem audiowise was the volume control, which didn’t seem to vary the volume properly.

Four of the seven tracks: Honolulu, Tokyo, Mumbai (aka Bombay), Rome

N-Gage Arena

Shamefully, the only Arena feature of Asphalt 3 is a rankings board. No shadow racing, no online multiplayer, just high score posting.

Even worse, we could not get the rankings to work at all, either in the game or in the N-Gage app. The screen just stayed blank.

As things stand, Asphalt 3 gets a big fat zero for its online features, which is a real shame because it has a lot of potential as an online multiplayer game. Hopefully Asphalt 4 will let us race against each other on the Arena in real time.

Overall

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.