Asphalt 9: Legends - Epic Car Action Racing Game APK

Asphalt 9: Legends adapts arcade racing to mobile devices and manages to pack a range of features and modes that would be more expected from a console or PC release. The production values are an immediate standout. Bright neon and vibrant splashes of color help create a real and kinetic sense of movement on the road, and the detail work provided for both the cars and the environments help set a standard for graphical achievement in a mobile game.

Those graphics are even more impressive when you take into consideration the scale of vehicles you have to choose from. There are well over a hundred cars to collect, with representation from some of the biggest luxury and racing car manufacturers in the world. In lieu of tuning up your car or swapping out parts to get the exact performance you want, each vehicle has a star rating that can be upgraded by unlocking a series of blueprints for them. Raising the star rating of cars also lets you create highly detailed custom paint jobs that you can then show off in the game. The race tracks you'll visit over the course of your tour is impressive too. The courses take you from San Francisco to New York while also offering a view of the midwest, and its globetrotting course charts a path encompassing everywhere from Cairo to Shanghai to Rome. The detail and sense of authenticity are genuinely exciting the first few times you race through them.

The sense of speed and the satisfying impact that comes with a crash are also initially exciting, but Asphalt 9 Legends is fortunately more rewarding as a car collecting simulator than as a racing game. There's nothing inherently wrong with the experience here. The touch controls are about as tight as you could expect from a mobile racing game, and the initial bout of races have a sense of simple but satisfying arcade energy to them. The single player mode offers something resembling a story campaign, and it's a satisfyingly long introduction to the progression loop of unlocking and upgrading new cars that dominates the multiplayer and special events experiences. And the different types of events are varied as well. Whether you're racing against time or racing from the cops, there's always a good excuse to build the tension and force your foot on the pedal.

But once you settle into the progression loop, you'll realize that you're repeating the same series of races over and over again for the satisfaction of unlocking new cars that are functionally similar except for their paint jobs and a higher set of statistics. Asphalt 9 Legends is great for collectors who want a virtual garage to check in on, but fans of arcade racers should at least get some satisfaction out of it as well.