I don't know why bargain bins are always littered w/ driving games but such has been the way of things for as long as I can remember. Currently residing on the dustiest shelves of a game store near you is one particular driving game that absolutely deserves to be there: Asphalt 3D. You can get it for maybe five bucks from any large chain of game retailers or your favorite auction website... but don't.
Asphalt 3D seems solid at first. We are not talking AAA-level polish but a decent B game is nothing to sneeze at--esp. for a launch title, which this was. It is not a world beater as far as driving mechanics but its graphics look good enough to make for some nice screen caps and there's a good number of unlockable tracks, licensed cars and upgrades to keep you busy. This seems to check most of the boxes for a good arcade racer. Unfortunately, check the boxes is all it does.
The driving mechanics ultimately feel shallow and fiddly and the way the game creates difficulty is just cheap. You get blown off the line by AI opponents in every race and by the fifth circuit or so, this is a big enough disadvantage that you basically might as well restart the race if you make any kind of major mistake. To make matters worse, the draw distance isn't good enough to see oncoming traffic so you get into a head-on collision through no fault of your own every few laps or so. Every single time, this knocks you into last place. Every. Single. Time. There is no rubber banding to help you catch up so this is one just one more thing that will have you restarting races constantly once you are a few hours in.
The chief driving gimmick is a boost you can get if you fill a meter on the screen. This is done w/ on-track pickups, going airborne and using the game's drifting mechanic. The drifting seems to be the main way you can use this to your advantage but it's implementation is weird and finicky and it's really hard to tell which corners are suited to it w/o trial and error. You might get through a tough corner losing minimal speed or come to a nearly complete halt and there is never any clear indicator why or when either of these two things will happen. Using drifting to fill up your boost meter at first seems like a good way to make up ground when you fall behind in a race but it ultimately ends up being unreliable enough that it doesn't work for that purpose.
I will admit, I did enjoy the first few circuits of Asphalt 3D. It feels pretty good until they throw the first bit or real challenge at you and then it's problems add up in record time and the whole thing becomes insufferable. I do suppose that a couple of hours of entertainment for five bucks makes this a better value than seeing a new movie or something but, as a game, it is truly lacking. If you accidentally buy it, give it to someone you don't like. But not me. I'm on to your little games.
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