by
Ted Kritsonis
Faze Video Game Editor

Racing games nowadays offer a whole load of cars and tracks, and with the way you can soup them up now, you would think a garage was built into the game. Nokia’s Asphalt Urban GT is a handheld racing game that tries to race with the best of them but sometimes finds itself driving on the wrong side of the road.

The bread and butter of any racing game is the racing itself and the central problems of the game lie in that area. The frustrating learning curve involved will see you run the same race over and over again just to make the turns without hitting something. The controls are basic but also unresponsive.



While this gives the impression that GT is a racing sim, it actually comes across more as an arcade racer given that your car can sustain an incredible amount of damage. Then again, with the way you crash into things on turns, it’s probably better that it doesn’t show at all.

The locales you race in are a nice mixture of places that range from Cuba to New York to even Chernobyl in the Ukraine. The environments aren’t too detailed but some of them are colourful and vibrant, while the ones that aren’t supposed to be are quite dark and daunting. At least you’re moving at a fast pace, or else you’d notice just how blocky everything is on-screen.

But aesthetics aren’t enough here. The fact that an SUV handles the same as a Porsche is inexcusable. Both slip and slide the same way, and even if you were to make adjustments in the garage, you won’t be making those corners easier anyway.



This isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot for you to do in GT. The Cop Chase mode is a fun game once you get used to it and the Evolution mode, where you earn cash to soup up your ride, has its moments.

When it’s all said and done, Asphalt Urban GT falls flat way too often. Had the racing controls been tighter and the learning curve a little more manageable, Nokia would’ve offered a much better game than what stands here. A racing game that keeps going back and forth from sim to arcade loses any semblance of stability, and that’s not the way a racing game should be.

Publisher:
Nokia
Developer:
Gameloft

Platform:
N-Gage

Rating: 6/10