Chrisracer8903

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Asphalt 8: a great game that is destroyed by the "Play-to-Win" structure. The good: -Amazing graphics and quality gameplay for a mobile racing game, easily one of the best I have seen to date. -Great car list to choose from (Heck, my car is in this game!). -Good course **** not as good as Asphalt 7. The bad: - The game's "Pay-to-Win" structure completely obliterates everything this gorgeous game has to offer. I am not even going to bother with what I specifically like about this game. The "Play-to-Win" structure is such a huge problem with how this game works and it's programmed on purpose against the players. In-game purchases such as unlocking faster cars early in the game or buying certain parts for actual money is not new in games, it has been around for a few years, but this game charges you for everything - I feel as if Gameloft will put a charge on my credit card just for booting-up the **** they probably would if they could. If you choose not to purchase car packs for $100 (yes...I am not joking that there are car packs for $100) the game will make it impossible to win events until you break down and spend money to bypass them. The AI cheats and is unrealistically hard. Many of the very early events in the career are nearly impossible to finish in the top 3 and is very common to finish dead-last no matter how aggressive you drive - the rubber-band AI will constantly pull far ahead of you with no chance to catch-up. This AI structure makes it nearly impossible to win races to earn any points to upgrade cars or purchase new ones, but instead leads to racing the same races over and over and OVER again until your frustrated and just "buy" your way into winning the game. THIS IS NOT HOW A VIDEO GAME IS MEANT TO BE PLAYED! I never spent a penny on in-game purchases except for the money to actually buy the game. 6 months into Asphalt 8 and I was still trying to upgrade the first car your given to move onto the next series then found out my car was no longer qualified for the races and needed to purchase a car that (at the rate I'm going) will take me two years to buy or go spend $20 at the in-game **** thank you! Asphalt 8 is an amazing game, but is a huge scam to players and Gameloft knows it. The fact they charged this game to players (At launch date) then started tweaking the game's difficulty to buy your way to winning should be an illegal business practice. Playing a video game is about beating all the events, not buying your way to unlock everything. Do not buy this game and do not support Gameloft and this method of business. If have to have a solid racing game for your mobile device then get Asphalt 7 - it has a lot of variety in content that you don't need to buy in order to win and the graphics still hold well to this day. With the same amount of money you need to win/buy cars in Asphalt 8, you could spend that same money on a console/PC game and get all your content and features up front without paying to win. Also, if anyone else reading this review thinks the pay-to-win model in this game is bad, the video game industry is headed towards that direction and is a complete rip-off to the consumers. This could very well kill the future of video games to many consumers such as myself. Score: 2 (1 for the cars, 1 for the graphics) -8 for the "Play-to-Win" structure.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I've played every train simulation game ever since Microsoft Train Simulator in 2001. What can I say about this game? Well, it looks nice and some of the sounds are great, but not all of them. Many of the horns, bells, and other sounds are heavily recycled into various locomotives (Both default and DLC) which is unrealistic and shows the developers are slacking. The train cars are way too quiet, but 3rd party developers have fixed that. There are many unrealistic physics in the game regarding controlling the train over grades and the slacking between the cars, but some of the routes are very scenic and enjoyable. The nice graphics and scenery come at a price, though. I have a good PC that runs most of the current-gen racing games at maximum settings and 70-80FPS with minimal demands on my PC, but this game just hogs all your computer's resources just to have medium-low end settings and 35 FPS at best. A train game should be less demanding than a game where a car is going 200 mph down city streets. This is poor programming on their part. The scenarios are a joke! None of them follow realistic train operations (At least the North American route DLCs) which I think is unfair for the North American users of the game. Many of the scenarios do not even cover the entire route and recycle the same rolling stock over and over again which takes away the authentic feeling of the railroad your running on. The DLC is way too expensive and the route editing tools are neat, but way too complicated compared to Trainz Simulator's easy surveyor mode. It's the same game re-released every year with different enhancements that are no more than a glorified patch and these updates "break" older content both paid DLC and user-created content. I'm giving this game a 5 because the game looks nice and has some good moments, but the scenarios do not simulate the actual railroad's operations (at least for the US routes) and there are glitches in certain parts of the game that have never been fixed ever since the first installment was released (Rail Simulator back in 2008). The DLC is too expensive for the amount of recycled content and sounds they include. It costs too much money to get what you really want out of this game when the other train sims out there have 1000s of free 3rd party content items to create your own railroading experience. This game is good for if you want to run one of the default routes to pass some time, but my suggestion, if you like trains (like me) and you have money, your better off spending your money to build a your own model railroad. It's much more rewarding and fun than this sim is. If you want a really realistic railroad sim (With multiplayer), Run 8 is a much better train simulator defiantly worth checking out over this!

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]