Asphalt Injection Review: A Pleasant Surprise

Asphalt Injection Review

Asphalt Injection
PlayStation Vita
Ubisoft
Racing

Asphalt Injection is an arcade racing title available on the PlayStation Vita. I happen to love a good arcade racer, I always have and always will. So when it came time to put this one in and give it a go, I was fairly addicted to it right from the beginning. It has very easy controls for you to handle which is the first important step to being a good racer. Of course it varies depending on your vehicle as one car can handle better than the other. But overall the handling of the vehicles is easy enough and the same goes for the drifting aspect. You can also unlock a number of different kits for your car of choice to help improve on the vehicle’s performance.

Another important factor to the gameplay is that you can collect boost icons so that you can do just that. Your boosting not only helps you pick up speed but also makes it tougher to wreck. If you fill up your meter to maximum you will be invincible for that short amount of time, meaning you can wreck into any car with ease. Wrecks are an important part of some of the games, since they are used to get bonuses as well. For instance, gaining a first place finish will earn you 3 stars, but if you wreck a certain number of cars during the race you can earn another star. Same goes for drifting and earning drift points.

Speaking of unlocking content, this game has a large amount of content available for you to unlock. Of course, the more you race the more you unlock. Each race sets you up with the chance of earning a total of 5 stars. You will need to collect as many stars as possible so that you can unlock addition vehicles as well as additional competition stages. There are a lot of stages for you to unlock and race in, as well as a good amount of locations. This leaves you with a lot of content that will keep you busy for quite some time, and of course you still have the online modes as well. I must also mention that a lot of the tracks are well designed with a number of alternative routes available to racers. That adds to the enjoyment of racing on each track.

I am fairly certain that most of your playing time will come from the career mode. Online will certainly challenge that at times, but career mode is fun to go through. It’s not real deep or detailed in terms of player profile, but you have a good selection of different types of races and different objectives that keep it entertaining. Game types such as time attack, elimination, urban destruction, drift, run from the cops, all are in addition to your regular races. It really does keep it entertaining and fun to play through the different game types, especially as you begin to unlock additional cars for you to use.

When it comes to playing Asphalt Injection online, I have found it to be an extremely laggy experience. It’s not laggy for you to race, meaning it feels similar to any other race, but it’s laggy in terms of your opponent’s vehicles. Now I have had one or two smooth games, but the majority of them where insanely jumpy. It gets so bad that I had a couple of moments where a car that appears to be moving ahead of me will all of a sudden be completely stopped causing you to wreck. But of course, after you wreck, it appears as if it never stopped. Besides the jumpiness of the opponents, the online games can be fairly fun to play and to rank up your level. You are also able to select any car from the game to use online, unlike single player where you need to unlock them first. I do wish the online menus where slightly better and that they had better profiles for you to keep track of stats. Lastly, online does keep track of time attack leaderboards so that you can have fun competing on that.

I must say that I had a lot of fun playing through this title as it captured my attention and kept me fairly engaged. It’s not the best arcade racer that I have ever played, especially as it has a few faults within the game. Thankfully those faults are nothing major except for the online play. The only other real complaint I had dealt with how easy it was for me to get “wrecked” by another car. Or if I barely hit the wall to hard it would “wreck” me. That’s why you buy the armor though! It has been awhile since I’ve enjoyed a good arcade racer and Asphalt Injection was just what I needed. Having a lot of depth also helped to give me good, long lasting enjoyment with this game. It looks solid enough visually and has a decent techno style soundtrack to race to if that’s your type of music. I was pleasantly surprised by this title and recommend it to anyone looking for a decent arcade style racer.

Score: 7.5/10