Review by: Justin Amirkhani

Every new piece of gaming hardware needs an obligatory racing game in the launch lineup. The Nintendo 3DS is lucky that in addition to the traditional launch day Ridge Racer title, Ubisoft and Gameloft have released Asphalt 3D to give you a choice. Turns out, neither is terribly good.

As an arcade racer Asphalt 3D is a fairly barebones experience. The campaign is split into the expected time trials, 1-on-1, and group races but throws in a Burnout-inspired vigilante mode where you throw opponents off the road and a Need for Speed-inspired elimination mode where the last driver of each lap is eliminated.

The modes aren’t the only thing Asphalt 3D borrows though; a lot of its elements are taken directly from more established games. There are cops that chase drivers if they activate a trigger, ala Hot Pursuit and a scoring system eerily similar to Project Gotham Racing. Asphalt tries to be the best of all worlds, but this smorgasbord of genre concepts doesn’t help give the game its own personality.

What sets this apart from every other generic racing game is the fact that it’s on the Nintendo 3DS and playable on the world’s first glasses-free 3D system. How does Asphalt 3D take advantage of this? It doesn’t really, but that doesn’t mean that the added depth isn’t appreciated.

There are no gimmicks or playful effects that take full advantage of the new hardware, but there is an added level of immersion as you watch the road ahead pull in to the foreground at 88 MPH. This is one game that definitely benefits from the screen’s ability to push the background farther away. Unfortunately poor anti-aliasing is magnified when seen in 3D and this leaves elements of your car and the environment vibrating with even minimal movement.

The graphical problems extend to the usual suspects for a rushed handheld game; low-resolution textures, stiff geometry, and poorly blended tiles all make their appearance. These would be passable of course, if they let the game operate at an efficient framerate but things start to stutter when cars bunch up. It gets even worse when they start colliding.

Rather than forcing you to deal with rubber band AI, the computer opponents fire off the starting line and set their order early on leaving you to catch up and overtake them one at a time. It’s a solution to racing design problems, but not a very good one; things always feel like an uphill battle and because it’s systemic it never feels fair.

With plenty of cars and parts to unlock, there’s enough content to satisfy those who enjoy collecting things but without a serious tuning system it never evolves beyond hoarding virtual stuff. The vehicles themselves provide decent progressive upgrades and feel like a serious improvement the first time you get behind the wheel. Of course cars need to be earned by breaking a certain level with experience points and by earning enough cash to buy it. Naturally, the cars are always accessible by the time you need them to compete effectively, regardless of how well you seem to drive.