When you fire up your 69 pence worth of Asphalt 7 Heat for iPhone and iPod Touch, you don’t need to necessarily have too high expectations, but this is a rare situation in which you can pitch them high and the game’s infallibility will smash them every time. The graphics are nothing short of jaw-dropping and the intensity of the gameplay is an easy challenger to some of the best racing games ever releases on any console.
There are lots of races and race types to take part in to give Asphalt 7 the depth to last a very long time, but add to that the fact that you can play online and against mates and you’ve got one of the best game releases of the year. If that wasn’t enough, the cars on offer are amazingly stylised with option to customise and upgrade them. With some stunning cars to work hard to unlock there’s a genuine incentive to play the game into the tarmac on top of the sheer fun of it.
Produced by Gameloft, it’s the culmination of years working on a race engine for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and if you compare it to some of their earlier releases like GT Racing Motor Academy in 2010, it’s a significant step forward. The steering function on Asphalt 7 Heat thanks to the tilt and turn controls is very easy to work with and adds to the sheer playability of the game.
The only real negative is that the drift function has an extremity that would benefit from being taken down a notch or two, but the Nitro Boost function adds a lot of compensation for this, especially when the midnight-blue surrounding of the Adrenaline boost kicks in.
There are a lot of stunning tracks to race on, ranging from New York, London, New Orleans, the Alps, Rio, Paris, Moscow, Miami, LA, Hawaii, Cuba, Tokyo, Shanghai and the lava flow of Reykjavik.
Despite its brilliantly reasonable price tag, Asphalt 7 Heat stacks up well against any racing game contenders, whether they’re on the PS3, PSP or XBox 360. The best racer on the iPod Touch and iPhone to date! And one of the first to make the tilt and turn technology of the device work well.
Asphalt 7 Heat review: 4.7/5
