I am partial to a driving game and will try to get to grips with the vast majority of those that are released onto the world of Xbox. From the sublime (Forza Horizon 5) to the ridiculous (Super Woden GP II, although I did enjoy parts) I will get behind the wheel of anything that has a beating heart of internal combustion.
However, the game that has ended up on my desk this time around has been a bit out of the ordinary – a free to play game based on mobile underpinnings.
Asphalt Legends Unite is from those at Gameloft and so can this persuade me to forsake Mexico and FH5? Strap on your racing boots and let’s find out!
Generally at this point in proceedings, I’d waffle on about the story of the game, but here I can’t. That is because there is literally no attempt made to explain why we are suddenly taking a ton of very expensive cars out and ragging them around the streets – we just are. There’s a car, there’s a course, and so we’re left to put the two together and see what happens. Done.
But what about the presentation? Well, if you are between the ages of 5 and 15, I’m sure it will all feel wonderful. All the cars look the part, some dripping in neon, others modified to within an inch of their lives, and Asphalt Legends Unite looks like the video game equivalent of a copy of Max Power from the ‘90s. The tracks are an imaginative bunch too, with locations ranging from a Scottish island to inner city Rome.
We’ll go as far to say that the racing action looks great, with nitrous to use and drifts to engage in, accompanied by reasonable sound as well, with a bunch of “bangin’ choons” blaring out over the top of the sounds of the engines and tortured tyres that make up the rest of the soundtrack. It isn’t Forza Horizon 5 standard, nor even in the same postcode, but I have seen worse looking games, I have to admit.
How does Asphalt Legends Unite play? The answer to that is an easy one – very simply. If Forza Horizon 5 is an arcade racing title, Asphalt Legends Unite is on an entirely different planet, as the controls and everything else are incredibly simple and easy to use. You can even switch on auto accelerate and a thing called “Touchdrive” (yes, even on the Xbox) and this makes the whole gameplay part trivial. Line up on the line, and then let the computer do the rest, why not?
However, even choosing to drive as much as the game will let you is still full of annoyances – why do the AI cars all have so much more nitro, why is it I can lead an entire race and three AI drivers will pass in the last five yards, why does drifting feel so loose and rubbish, and many more questions come to mind, unfortunately rarely answered. All in all, Asphalt Legends Unite is a disappointing attempt at a racing game.
There has been a go at creating a good amount of content for the game, mind. There are career events to take part in, that seem never ending, there are multiplayer races that work quite well, despite constant server glitches and disconnects, there are daily, weekly and seasonal challenges to have a crack at, and so on and so forth. The problem is that none of it is much fun, sadly, and even the multiplayer, which is currently quite well populated, feels limp and dull.
The other problem is the way the AI cars are all much higher powered than yours – I’m doing a race at the moment where the recommended car level is 590. My Chevy’s level is 1150, and is still getting battered by the AI. Absolutely ridiculous.
And now we have to address the elephant in the room, and that free to play model Asphalt Legends Unite runs with. It is incredibly intrusive, I’m not going to sugar coat it, and at times it is incredibly annoying as well. For instance, each car has a fuel tank with a number of races in it. ”Fair enough”, you may think, “I can live with that”. As did I, the first time, but once those charges are gone, the car is out of action for 15 minutes. Or, and here’s the kicker, you can pay a certain number of in-game currency to fill the tank up again and race immediately. But what if you don’t have enough of the currency? Well, you can always buy some using real money. Car not cutting it? Buy a new one! The most powerful card that you can use in this game is the credit card, it seems, and pay to win is alive and well.
Even the daily challenges that should help you top up your dwindling reserves are full of things like “Buy something from the Legends store” and so on, and the sheer amount of attempts to get you spending money is really, really wearing. Even the stuff that you can pay for (I refused for the purposes of this review) appears to be random in nature, so you are basically gambling with real money. I hate this model of gaming.
So, all in all, Asphalt Legends Unite is a poor racer that attempts to make you buy your way up the leaderboards. If you have more money than sense, you may have fun here, but for everyone else this is a bad racing game made worse by cynical attempts to get you to open the wallet. Avoid and play something, anything, else is my strong advice.
