Asphalt 9: Legends is now officially out, and it’s not only the most beautiful game yet in the series, it’s also the easiest and most accessible thanks to its new Touch Driving system. Touch Driving is arguably one of the biggest factors that makes this game different from its forerunners, and it does so by essentially letting your car drive itself, and just having you decide what path to take at forks, when to use nitro, and when to drift. It is, of course, completely optional. Aside from this peculiarity, this game is more of the same grandeur and bombast that’s marked the Asphalt pedigree since the sixth entry, and it’s bigger and better than ever before.
As all the other Asphalt games have done in the past, this one presents you with a garage featuring a massive number of real licensed vehicles, ranging from daily drivers to hypercars, that come with a simply insane amount of possible customization points in both how they look and how they run. You’ll careen through some of the prettiest courses the mobile racing genre has to offer, all while catching huge air, pulling off sick drifts and wiping out other players in your path. This is also the first game to feature Clubs, a multiplayer system that’s sort of like crews in the Need For Speed series, but with other players racing alongside you instead of computerized racers. As a bonus, Asphalt 9: Legends is the only racing game to feature the Lamborghini Terzo Millennio, a concept hypercar that is currently unavailable to the general public in any other form, virtual or otherwise.
Asphalt has a long pedigree of being one of the grandest and most heart-pounding arcade racing game series in the world, let alone when it comes to mobile gaming. The series’ humble origins on the feature phones of yesteryear and the Nintendo DS, with far less cars to choose from and less of a focus on big-ticket action, led up to a shift that started small in Asphalt 5, then cranked up in the sixth entry and has been a selling point for the games ever since. Asphalt 9: Legends ups the ante and embodies everything the brand name stands for. Those who usually don’t play racing games have the concept Lamborghini as motivation, and this free download should be a no-brainer for existing Asphalt fans. The game weighs in at nearly 2GB, but as long as you have the storage and a somewhat decent device, you should be able to run the game, even if you have to lower the graphical settings just a bit.
