Asphalt 9 Legends : An Honest Review


Highlights
  • Asphalt 9 has good collection of tracks, cars, and special effects.
  • Some bugs must be fixed so that the game runs smoothly in mid- range Android Devices.

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 Everyone of us was waiting for a fabulous game from Gameloft after the success of Asphalt 8 : Airborne which is currently the most downloaded game on Google Play.

 To satisfy our demands Gameloft released Asphalt 9 : Legends on July 25, 2018 after a soft launch version previously released on February 27, 2018. The soft launch covered users of only Phillipines.

 Today, we are going to review Asphalt 9 : Legends. On 13 different Parameters and see if this game is worth downloading or not. 

These parameters are:

 Visuals, Controls, Cars, Tracks, Special Effects, Lighting, Speed, Resolution, Battery Life and Thermals, Game Credits, Multiplayer, And Connectivity issues and bugs.

 So let's start

 Visuals:- Visuals are always the selling points of All Gameloft games. 

The visuals of Asphalt 9 : Legends game are much better than its predecessor Asphalt 8 : Airborne. The game has stunning visuals that completely makes it a game of Twenty - First century.

 The game tours you from the snows of The Himalayas to the Pyramids of Egypt.

 The visuals of this game are like console games. Visuals are more advanced than Asphalt 8 : Airborne.

 Controls:- The game features swipe drive control feature like Temple Run.

Using Touch Drive lets you decide which direction your car should be going, allowing you to avoid obstacles, jump ramps, or ram into your opponents along the way, while turns and acceleration of the car are handled automatically. You control when you want to use nitro to boost your speed or perform drifts and stunts by tapping the screen. 

Granted it lacks the granular, fine-tuned alternatives like Tilt to Steer that uses your phone’s gyroscope to steer or Tap to Steer that has virtual buttons, it’s a neat addition that makes Asphalt 9 a lot more accessible for those that don’t want to fuss over the many twists and turns of each race track.

We found all three control schemes to be equally responsive.

 Cars:- Asphalt 9 : Legends differs from its predecessors in the field of the rate at which we acquire new cars.

In our time with the game, we found ourselves upgrading attributes of our existing vehicles and using them more often rather than switching between multiple rides unless the race called for a specific type of car.

This is because collecting new cars is less frequent. You don’t get them as a reward for finishing an event, instead you get a blueprint —
 A part for a new car. Earning new cars depends on the number of blueprints you acquire through races and via card packs — 
the game’s take on loot boxes — 
that are available as in-app purchases.

You can also earn card packs by completing a set of events or watching ads.

 Connectivity:- Like most free-to-play games with micro-transactions, you need to be online at all times.

This is necessary to prevent any form of cheating or circumvention of its in-app purchases. However the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. For example, if you’re switching between apps even for a moment you will be disconnected from the game even if you’re just on menu screen, which doesn’t happen in other games. This seemed to happen regardless of the connection we were on, be it Wi-Fi, 3G, or 4G.

Although it will try to reconnect automatically, it detracts from the experience. Now that Ashphalt 9 is out worldwide, perhaps this is one area where we will see an improvement.

 Battery Life and Thermals:- As for battery life and thermals, a 20 minute session of Asphalt 9 set us back by 20 percent on an iPhone 6s with a recently replaced battery and while the phone got hot to touch, it never reached a point where it was unplayable.

Suffice to say, your mileage may vary. 

So, we can conclude that the battery life of this game varies from device to device. Our iPhone 6 was hot to touch even when we played only 20 minutes thus we are sure that this problem will effect a vast number of global users because iPhone 6s is an advanced device.

 Tracks:- Asphalt 9 Legends game features a variety of tracks available for racing. It ranges from American Midwest railroad track to The Himalayas and Egypt.

It is really fun to kick off dust while racing in the American Midwest railroad track and driving our car in the snow of Himalayas and the sand of Egypt respectively. Unlocking tracks can be done as you complete levels.

We can conclude that Asphalt 9 : Legends game features a large number of good quality tracks and there are very few games that give you such a large number of good quality track variations. You have to contend with falling stones in the Himalayas and Tornadoes in the United States.

 Multiplayer:- Like its predecessor Asphalt 8 : Airborne Asphalt 9 : legends also features the multiplayer option through which you can play with your friends and other people throughout the globe that our online.

In Asphalt 9 : Legends a multiplayer game consists of only 8 players and that makes it easier to win the race if you have a little experience of the game.

The multiplayer version rarely hangs if you have a good internet connection.

If personally have played over 20 multiplayer games and it never hanged.

Although, some users of devices like Redmi Note 5 pro have reported that the multiplayer version hangs but I have never heard of such complaints on phones of Apple I series.

So, if your phone has enough graphics and  storage then you do not have to be worried about this problem.

 Special Effects:- The developers of Asphalt 9 : Legends has tried to give Asphalt 9 some beautiful special effects.

I have played the game for a short period of time only but I have seen specials effects while driving my cars in the Himalayan track and the American Railway track. In the Himalayas, while I was driving stones were falling from the mountain peak to the road and in the United States we have to drive our car away from the tornadoes.

The developers has tried their best to give this game a real life touch.

 Game Credits:- Buying App purchases in Asphalt 9 : Legends is quite expensive. The App purchases can cost you up to $108. You can also get Game credits by completing levels yourself.

But, too unlock most of tracks and cars you may need to but game credits if you don't have the time to play the game daily. Thus, we can say that game credits in Asphalt 9 : Legends are quite expensive and necessary to play the game freely as game credits are needed to unlock almost all cars and tracks in the game.

 Lighting:- In Asphalt 9 : Legends like Asphalt 8 after completion of each race the car slows down and shows the motion blur effect. Lighting in Asphalt 9 : Legends game is perfect. 

In each and every track whether it be day seen or night seen there is appropriate lighting is available.

On both Android and iOS versions lighting is appropriate. Like all Gameloft games Asphalt 9 has featured its red color and that looks great when driving.

 Speed:- Like all Asphalt games Asphalt 9 also features good speeding features.

You can race at a speed of 0kmph to a speed of over 120kmph.

Its really fun while speeding the car from rest to 100kmph. It becomes very easy to defeat our opponents when are constantly running at a speed of approximately 120kmph.

The game becomes amazing at the top speeds.

 

Resolution:- The game supports arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios, such as 21:9 (2560x1080). It's not really surprising, considering that it's first and foremost a mobile game that just happens to be playable on Windows 10 machines and as we all know, Android phones come with a bunch of different screens (in terms of aspect ratio) and the game has to support all of them.To add to the first point, the HUD elements show up correctly on the sides of the screen and there is no stretching at all. The only small problem is that the main menu of the game is 18:9 (because mobile screens currently don't really go higher than that), but at least it is not stretched, there will be black bars on the screen if you use a wider monitor than 18:9.It is very well optimized, I was able to play it easily in 5K at max settings at a constant 60FPS, but honestly, it's to be expected considering the game's overall simplicity and it's low-level simulation complexity.The number of in-game options regarding graphics are limited, but a game like this should run at max settings on basically any machine so it shouldn't really be a problem at all. 

The graphics options are the following: Resolution Scale, FPS limit, Full Screen (on/off), Anti-Aliasing, Bloom, Depth of Field, Motion Blur, God Rays, Reflections.

There are some settings that are worth talking about. The FPS limiter only lets you choose between 30 and 60 FPS, which is disappointing, considering that there are even gaming focused phones now that support 120 FPS... and we are talking about PCs here. The game's anti-aliasing for some unknown reason can't be turned on (it's possibly a bug) and this makes the image very rough, there are a lot of jagged edges and shimmering on the screen.

You can compensate that by rendering the game at 4x your native resolution (which is 5120x2160 in my case), but it still won't completely solve the problem.

Also even if you want to down sample your image, you need to use a custom desktop resolution and then start the game after that because you can't change the resolution in-game, and the in- game resolution slider only goes up to 150%.There is a built-in controller support, however, once the game stopped registering the [A] button which is the Accept button in this game, so I had to restart the game to fix this because I wasn't able to get past given screens without having to use my mouse.

Also you can't properly navigate in the menu with a controller if you want to browse your car selection for example.

You need to hold down the [A] button and use the stick to scroll left or right (which is basically the same as swiping left or right on mobile). Because if you do that and finish the scrolling and then let go of the [A] button, there's a very high chance that you'll open something that you do not want - another car's menu for example - and then you have to go back and try to scroll to the place you wanted again.

 Bugs:- Currently there are a few bugs in Asphalt 9 but Gameloft™ is slowly fixing this bugs to make the game smoother.

Even after changing the steering sensitivity to 80%, it goes to back to 50% automatically. Gameloft, must fix this problems and I wish there could be an option of "low" in display settings so that people can enjoy smooth gameplay this game in mid range devices.

There are very few bugs in the iOS version but the game is not able to run smoothly in many mid-range Phones like Redmi Note 4 and Redmi Note 5. 

 Summary

If you are fond of racing games then you must try Asphalt 9 : Legends because it is the most featured racing game currently available. The Size of this game is larger than 1.5GB as it has amazing graphics.

Ratings:- 4.2/5