Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD review (iPad)

April 24, 2011

♫ “I, I just took a ride
In a Silver Machine
And I’m still feeling mean”

10 word description: Car racing, 42 licensed vehicles, multiple modes, crashes, adrenaline power-up.

10 word review: Exciting, super-fast destructive racing. Loads of vehicles and upgrades.

You can paint the cars any colour you like and cover them in crappy stickers.

You will like this if you enjoy: Crashing virtual cars at high speed, trippy power-up visuals, arcade smash-em-up rather than realistic simulation racing.

Blah blah ... don't try this at home, etc.

The good news: It’s great fun. It’s fast. There are motorcycles as well as cars. It looks great.

That's one of the more subtle effects.

The bad news: Occasionally it will hang inexplicably for a second or two – for no reason I could identify. Someone looking for a realistic hardcore racing sim will probably not like it. It’s probably a bit too easy, at least for the first few groups of races.

Dominating the first couple of leagues is fairly easy.

Arcadelife verdict: This is my favourite iPad racing game (at the moment). It’s colourful, energetic, stupidly fast and it does very unrealistic things with “real” cars. The different race modes are all fun and eliminating other cars by ramming them at high speed never gets old. The occasional verbal comments are neither soulless pit-crew guidance or overenthusiastic yelling commentators; it’s an amused sounding woman who sarcastically points out that you shouldn’t have wrecked your car, or laughs appreciatively as you smash another opponent off the track.

There's no intrusive scenery pop-up, at least none that I've noticed.

Although it’s mostly very smooth and appears to shift at a respectable framerate, there are occasions when it hangs for a couple of seconds in the middle of a race, for no apparent reason. While this isn’t game-breaking, it happens often enough to be irritating.

"Hey dude, let's do a Hell landscape!" - "But this is supposed to a realistic driving sim!" - "Uh, you missed the latest memo, didn't you?"

Overall, if you want a frenetic arcade style racer where you can endlessly smash up Ferraris and Bentleys, progress is quick and there are many different tracks and vehicle upgrades, there really isn’t much else out there that does it as well as this, at least not on the iOS devices.