Asphalt 8: Airborne 12+

I enjoy playing this game very much, especially since they have added motorbikes. It is a very well developed game and requires skill from the player to navigate the vehicle around the tracks.

However, there are still a few things I would like to point out. Firstly, it can be quite hard to earn coins to buy new cars and bikes, but I can live with that. Also, I have found a glitch. Others may not have found this or it might not be present on their device, but it is quite annoying. I went onto this game this morning and decided to play a solo race (you can choose the track, mode, etc). I choose my bike (D class) on my chosen track (Sector 8, classic, D class, 2 laps) and all was fine. When I started racing, however, whenever I was near one of the other vehicles, my screen started to glitch out (eg. flashing colours) and I kept suddenly wrecking. This also happened on the motorbike seasons, occasionally. Please fix this bug as it is very annoying and makes it hard to win races.

"Perform all the tests and get the car for free!" This is typical A8 understatement promoting one of their frequent Research and Development projects that promise a desirable car, if you can pass a series of tests. But you will not be able to. Firstly, you will need to upgrade the car’s basic performance characteristics as much as you can afford, just to stand a chance of being competitive. On top of that, you will have to apply extensive tuning packs to tweak the performance. Even then you will more than likely fail most of the later tests, as the car, despite the improvements you have made, seems unusually unstable and prone to crash. And then, waiting right behind you is A8’s killer idea, the autopilot which promises to complete the task for you, for hard cash (blue tokens) of course. It says, "come on, you know this is rigged and you can keep trying all night but you’re never going to beat it. Maybe you’re just not good enough! So just press the button and put yourself out of your misery!" I am a “Pro" level driver but The last "free" R&D car I stupidly went after cost me $500 in real money.

A8 is and always has been great fun and I do not expect the company to come out with amazing products for free. But the excitement of competing and winning is increasingly being tarnished by the piffling prizes on offer and the terrible guilt of wasting good money on a sheer and expensive indulgence.

When I initially played asphalt 8, a few months after they first released it, it was brilliant thanks to the currency being of good value. Now, however, the credits you win after each race is less than half of what it used to be and the cost of the cars is much higher. Furthermore, they introduced a new currency when doing pro upgrades of a car which cannot be won in games and can only be earned by selling the cards (which are needed for a pro upgrade) to gain an underwhelming low value of this currency. This seems to be a trick that the developers are using to try and make people spend real money. Another mistake is that when playing online games half the time one cannot play online since it will say “updating information” and when you do actually get into the online games a lot of the time many people have hacked into the game and have made their cars achieve speeds of at least 300mph, cannot wreck their cars and will respawn at any point they wish on the track (meaning that even if you overtake then, they just glitch ahead of you). This is really disappointing as it prevents many honest players from gaining any winnings. Asphalt 8 was once a great game but they got too big for their boots and now are trying to force in app purchases whilst also not even bothering to maintain online servers.